


do you wanna (like you know i do)

by seabiscuit



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Cape Cod, F/F, Kind of AU, Side Lillian/Eliza, Slow Burn, bunk beds, kind of cannon divergent, romcom, side Alex/Sam
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-18
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-06 11:49:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13410642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seabiscuit/pseuds/seabiscuit
Summary: Lena is a real certified genius. Lena is on a fast track to get her PhD by the time she’s 30. Lena is 23 year old woman who has just found out two months ago that her middle name is Margaret while she was getting a copy of her birth certificate.—Or, the one where they’re all on their way to something and end up at a beach house in Cape Cod.





	1. is your bed made? is your sweater on?

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to poiesis/@weirddyke and captain-narraboth for beta reading and sending memes and encouragement in the face of how absolutely whack this is. I hope you guys will all trust me and come along for the ride on this one lmao 
> 
> Title and chapter titles from cape cod kwassa kwassa by vampire weekend

Lena has always existed in two incompatible countries: the world at large and the smaller, more private universe of herself. She is always the last person to know about herself. The world is a different story. Life is full of dichotomies like that, X and Y, apples and oranges. Ever since she was a little girl Lena has had a sharp eye for the inner surfaces of things. It was, in fact, the only compliment that she’d received from her mother in recent memory--that she could deduce and pare apart with a hard look and a screwdriver, that she saw things like toasters and cars and ovens not as other people perceived them but as they actually were. Gears and bulbs and wheels ripe for her to take them apart and examine, then improve upon.

Lena is a real certified genius. Lena is on a fast track to get her PhD by the time she’s 30. Lena is 23 year old woman who has just found out two months ago that her middle name is Margaret while she was getting a copy of her birth certificate. And she didn’t know she liked eggs with hot sauce on them until Jess made her try them at hangover brunch last week. And Lena is a lesbian, something else that hadn’t come up until embarrassingly recently. Hadn’t even known she liked girls, if she’s being completely honest with herself, and it turns out she likes them a lot.

That’s the kind of thing that humbles a person. It makes building a car from scratch at 14 years old seem insignificant in comparison.

She tells Jess the morning after her revelation, sitting at the island in the kitchen they share. Jess, with her senses fine-tuned from 3 years of friendship, knows something is up from the minute Lena steps out of her bedroom. She plies her with a plate of eggs, plain because it’s pre-hot sauce revelation, and looks at her like she’s not going to let up until Lena unravels the truth.

“I kissed somebody last night.” Lena admits through a mouthful of over-medium and toast. “A lot. We almost...had sex.”

It was one of the rare parties that she attended without Jess’s buffering presence. “I can stand engineering parties. Everybody is so snooty.” She’d said, running a flat-head brush down Lena’s hair. “But you should go. Get to know your classmates.” At the time, Lena figured that Jess had a point. She kept her head down in class and wasn’t friendly with people in her program, but the beginning of the semester was ripe for a fresh start. There would be alcohol, anyway. Lena doesn’t consider herself particularly wise or particularly brave, but it took gumption for her to pick out an outfit and exit the door of their apartment. It took even more to knock on the door of Sarah Steinberg’s apartment, wine bottle clutched in her hand, aware of what a huge mistake she was likely making.

When she says it, Jess’s eyebrows shoot up. Lena has been pathologically disinterested in sex since they’ve known each other, and even before then. She’d had boyfriends because boys were as important an accessory to being a wealthy and dutiful daughter as diamond necklaces or Jimmy Choos. Boys took her to cotillion and drank with her at boring galas and tried to shove their big, rough hands under her dresses. She’d have gone to CalTech before she let them do it, even the ones she liked. “Must’ve been a special guy.”

“It was a woman.” If anything, this eases Jess’s surprised look. “It all happened so fast—I don’t know.”

After years she’d come to relish rejection. It came easy to her, like cars and toasters, and it had no emotional stakes. Lena thinks of herself last night, catching Amy’s eye across the crowded living room and over the heads of strangers. She thinks of herself sitting half-dazed on a couch sinking in in the middle, using that as an excuse to shift closer while they spoke, and she thinks of herself swaddled in the dark of a stranger’s room begging a woman who’s name she barely remembers to take her panties off. She scarcely recognizes that person, her high-pitched needy voice, her gaped legs. Can’t see inside of her, no matter how hard she tries. It’s certainly not the same woman who broke Angus Smith’s index finger when he tried to get fresh in the back of a prom night limo.

“So.” Jess prods. “How are you...you know?” She jabs her fork around for emphasis.

“I’m fine. It’s fine. It’s fine.” Jess is coming around the island to wrap her up in a big hug, chin on the crown of her head. It only takes a little coaxing for her to sink into the embrace, right hand clutched uselessly around her fork still. Jess is saying honey, honey and sort of rocking her like she does when Lena needs a greater tether to earth than she can provide for herself.

“Can I really, actually be smart if I didn’t see this coming?”

“I don’t know, honey.” Jess says, still rocking. “Maybe.”

Her crisis of identity unfurls like the world’s longest, most fucked up flag. Every emergency spawns another, smaller subemergency. One woman named Amy at a party becomes many women, on campus, at bars, on the train. She notices them all, takes note of what kind of feelings they draw out of her. She needs to have a good data set if she’s going to come to any kind of verifiable conclusion.

“So,” Lena is standing in front of a piece of butcher paper on which she’s drawn a venn diagram, Jess sitting attentively on the couch in front of her. She has a legal pad out and a pen poised to take notes. “After two weeks of data collection, this is what I have. On the right--things lesbians do. On the left--things I do.”

“That looks like one circle to me.”

So it goes. Girls and middle names and hot sauce on eggs. It’d never been important for Lena to know herself before, it wasn’t part of her trajectory. Get good grades, reflect well on the family, eventually take over the business. That was it. But now that she’d started pulling the scarf out of the hat there was no way for her to stop.

It doesn’t help that her night with Amy was, for all intents and purposes, a one off. Now that she knows that she’s gay Lena can’t look at an attractive woman without having a panic attack, let alone talk to one, let alone get to third base with one. What she can do is sit in the back of somebody’s yoga class and gawk. And ever since she met Kara Danvers, that’s exactly what she’s been doing.

Maybe met is a strong word—she’d taken one of her yoga classes under the dual pressure of threats from her doctor and loosing a bet to Jess. When Kara walked out looking like no human woman had a right to, Lena nearly fell sideways onto the floor. That’s what has her weeks later sprinting across campus with a yoga mat slung over her shoulder and her phone attached to her ear. She’s just shy of being late for class, and the studio doors shut and lock 5 minutes after the designated start time.

“You’re going to be fine.” Jess drawls. “Plus, if you miss it, there’s another class tomorrow night. No biggie.”

“That’s not—woah!” Lena’s body pivots and she barely dodges a woman barreling past, head down. Typical of finals week. “That’s not going to work. Tomorrow night I have...plans.”

“Plans.” Jess snorts. “Or is Ms. Danvers not teaching class?”

The rec center is in sight and Lena almost foils herself by tripping over her own feet. “Ms. Who? I don’t know the instructor's name tonight.”

“Seriously? I can basically hear you stalking her Instagram from my bedroom.” That's not her fault. Kara Danvers’s instagram is, firstly, public and secondly, ab-forward. Lena isn’t a nun, but that doesn’t mean she has a crush. “Just ask her out. You haven’t gone on a single date since you came out.” To be fair, as Lena’s official Tinder manager, Jess would know.

“I’m not going to ask her out.” Lena realizes that she’s going to make it as she swipes her ID at the entrance and takes off in the direction of the classrooms. “She’s like...freakin’...Grecian. Or something. And I’m—“

“A total snack?”

“Bad at yoga. Listen, I gotta go, I’m right in front of the classroom.”

“Think about it!” Jess calls before Lena hangs up on her, rolling her eyes. She turns up with a minute to spare and fusses with the hem of her tank top and her bun before rolling her shoulders and opening the door.

The studio is cozy. There are 10 or 12 people in the class, mostly women, already settled on their mats. A few of them chat with each other as they stretch, folding their legs over their hips and their arms over their heads like it’s so easy. A dependable cohort of familiar faces shows up to the Wednesday night beginners yoga, most of whom seem to have earnest intentions. Most, except for Lena.

She rolls out her mat in the back, well away from the group, and arranges her water bottle next to it. Kara hasn’t materialized yet but there’s some shuffling in the adjacent equipment closet. Lena didn’t expect to have time to kill, and she doesn’t want to spend her time looking slack-jawed at the open space at the front of the room.

Music starts to filter out from above, some string quartet cover of a popular song. “Hi guys! Sorry, there were a couple technical difficulties.” Kara comes bouncing out of the equipment room in a sports bra and joggers hanging loose on her hips. She disposes of them promptly, whittling herself down to booty shorts in a matching pattern. Lena’s heart speeds up and Kara’s eyes zero in on her, an unfortunate coincidence. She takes a healthy drink from her water bottle. “How’s the music for everybody?”

A chorus of ‘good’ rings out. Kara flashes a grin, pleased, and Lena’s heart is revved into another gallop. When blue eyes flash to her again, Lena figures she must be imagining things. “Great. Let’s get started.”

Lena isn’t good at yoga and she has no intention of getting better. Her body weight would seem to be distributed with the singular intention of knocking her off balance, she’s not graceful, and she sure as hell doesn’t look as good in shorts as Kara does. But as her doctor helpfully pointed out to her, spending 23 hours of your day sitting in the library or falling asleep standing up at her drafting table is eventually going to grind her joints to chalk dust. She’d recommended jogging. Lena talked her down to yoga.

It’s really just a bonus that her instructor happens to look like Adonis and Cate Blanchett had one perfect child. Kara’s chipper voice talks them through a sun salutation that Lena barely sees the other side of. She waits for the eased-up modifications and does those instead, muddling into and out of downward facing dog. The sloppiness is part lack of practice and part not being able to look up because Kara twisting her body makes her eyes feel like they’re going to scorch out of her head.

An hour later she’s flat on her back in corpse, sweat drying on the armpits of her tank top. Yoga is supposed to help you take your mind off of things, which Lena knows, empirically speaking, but in her head she’s flipping through faculty members deciding on who she might want to advise her dissertation next year. Kara’s soothing voice tells them to relax and forget about the world. Lena mentally puts a red X through Dr. Uschmacher’s face, deeming him too much of a know it all.

“Okay guys, that’s all for today. Thank you for being so present.” There’s a quiet skirmish as the class begins to disband, popping joints and water bottle caps opening and soft murmurs. Lena rolls on her side and flips her phone over, finding about 20 emails from her mother with varying degrees of urgency and grammatical correctness. The most recent is titled _PLEASE READ: cape Cod Disaster!_ Next time she goes to the doctor Lena is asking for a Xanax prescription and being done with it.

Throughout the class she’s rationed the amount of times she can look at Kara. The perfect number is 9, over the course of an hour. Her engineer’s brain tells her that that’s the exact amount before it starts to seem like you’re too interested, and she always saves the 9th for before she exits the studio. It’s her longest by far. Lena likes to see Kara wriggle back into her joggers and scroll through her phone while she sips from her bottle from the side of her mouth. Today she’s talking to two other students, bag under her arm and laughing. Her hair, even in the harsh rec room lighting, is tawny and soft-looking, her eyes squint when she smiles big, and her laugh sounds like children playing in somebody’s backyard during summertime.

She looks stupid. Lena doesn’t have a crush. She just likes girls. And...abs, and Kara happens to fill all of her requirements on that front. She doesn’t realize that her allotted 9th look has gone on past the point of propriety until Kara’s pretty blue eyes flick up over the top of the women's heads to meet her gaze. The blonde woman smiles, barely a twitch of her lips, and Lena ducks her head. Busted.

 

\---

  
Kara likes these moments the best. When the classroom empties out and she has the space to herself for a few minutes before the next instructor comes through to stake their claim. Once the last person is gone, the dark-haired woman who always places herself near the back, Kara sits back on her still unrolled mat and exhales.

Her only personal training client for the night had cancelled so hypothetically she has the whole evening in front of her. To do what, she’s not sure. While Kara figures she’s not the only recent college graduate to have ever spent a Wednesday evening on her double bed masturbating and then watching a marathon of The Nanny, something about it makes her feel like a huge loser.

Maybe because she’s a huge loser.

Kara clicks over to her text messages. There’s only one conversation she’s interested in—Siobhan, who she’s put on silent but checks obsessively anyway. The last message is still as searing as it was when she’d first gotten it 2 weeks ago.

Kara [2:45 AM]: I miss youso much tbh  
Read 2:47

Alex and Eliza did pretty well at aping sympathy over the break-up while not making a secret of how much they’d disliked Siobhan. Kara’s learned among other things that there’s big difference between being told you’re too good for somebody and actually feeling that you are. Inadequacy was was a uniquely earth feeling. On Krypton she was like royalty. On earth she drove a 2002 Ford Taurus and spent her Wednesday nights scrolling through Siobhan’s Facebook to dig her finger deeper into that wound. This is the thing: it was just like Siobhan had said when they broke up. Kara is going nowhere and doing nothing.

Mindfulness. She rearranges her body like a pile of blocks, moving until she’s sitting with her hands on her crossed knees. The first image that drifts across her mind is of the dark haired woman in the back of her class struggling through a sun salutation. Kara doesn’t know her name but she’s a peculiar type of bird to be sure—most people progress quickly though her rudimentary beginners course into the intermediate classes, but here the woman has stubbornly remained. Unlike the other stragglers, she continues to labor her way through the simplest moves, choosing modified versions where others would forge ahead. It’s not that it matters to Kara, necessarily. A person could spin plates in the background of class and as long as it wasn’t a distraction she wouldn’t bat an eyelash.

But there was also the matter of the woman’s heart, a tricky thing. As a rule Kara didn’t use her powers to listen to other people’s biological comings and goings. It made her feel like a cheater. But the first class that the stranger showed up to her heart was crashing and banging so loud Kara thought there might be a fight outside of the studio. So, a little crush, maybe.

It’s a nice thought and Kara smiles. The woman is cute—a nice body and cute thighs and hair that looked like you could submerge your hand into up to your elbow. She was bad at yoga but went to MIT so, presumably good at other things. Kara works this thought around her head without gleaning anything useful from it, then packs up her things and walks out to the parking lot.

The last two years had been relentless. Life could take you on a trip like that, to places you had no idea you could even live. For Kara that place is her car parked outside of the MIT campus rec center, chewing on a peanut butter sandwich she keeps in her dashboard to eat between jobs, scrolling through her phone gallery and coming across her ex-girlfriend’s nudes every 5 or 10 pictures. Trying to decide if it’s worth it to drive Uber for a few hours or not, if maybe she should just go back to her cramped one bedroom and throw in the towel on the whole day. At this rate she could be in bed fast asleep by 8:30.

Alex’s contact picture pops on her screen as her thumb is hovering over the Uber icon and she waffles on answering it or not. Her sister can get a whiff of depression on her from 10 miles away with cotton stuck up her nose, and she’s probably on dinner break from work which means she’s wound up from 2 hours of cutting people open and weighing their vital organs. Kara swipes to accept and holds the phone to her ear. As if she could ever actually dodge Alex.

“Hey.”

“Kara? What’s the matter? You sound depressed.”

  
Kara drops her forehead against the steering wheel and bangs it a couple times. “I’m tired. Just got done with class.”

Alex hums, clearly unimpressed, and Kara hears chewing on the other side of the line. “Ok liar. Did you get those text messages from mom?”

“Uh.” Racking her brain, Kara tries to remember the last time she’d seen Eliza pop up in her notifications. After she’d alighted in a Cape Cod Air BnB two days ago she’d scarcely heard from her, which was fine. A year after Jeremiah, Eliza had well earned her _Under The Tuscan Sun_ moment and Kara wasn’t much concerned with her taking two weeks off from her invested mom routine. “Are you sure they were in the group chat?”

“Positive.” Alex confirms. “Did you put us on silent again?”

Yes. “No.”

“Well, the place she’s staying got double-booked, apparently.”

“Oh.” This causes Kara’s head to pop up and almost ricochet off the headrest. “She didn’t have to come home, did she?”

“No, she said that she’s sorted it out and then kind of...stopped responding to my messages. You think she’s okay, right?”

“Alex, she’s a big girl. She’s fine. Bet you ten bucks that she double booked with some hunky—like, yacht club owner, or something. She’s probably getting laid.”

There’s a long silence on the other end of the phone and Kara considers that she could have used more tact. Alex is sensitive about this kind of thing, has been since Jeremiah died, and it makes sense. Kara loves Jeremiah like the good man he was but he was Alex’s father, her real one.

“You don’t think she’s been...funny lately, do you?”

“What? Of course she’s been funny. Haven’t we all?”

“You know what I mean, Kara.” Eliza had started keeping things from Alex and Kara for the first time in recent memory, this is true. Angling her phone screen away when she was reading something and clearing her internet history on the family computer and taking impromptu trips to Cape Cod. But they were all three of them on personal journeys and Kara wants to respect Eliza’s like Eliza had been respecting her all but living out of her backseat and not using the degree she’d paid thousands of dollars for. Same road, different paths.

“I know, yeah.” Kara nods her head, knowing Alex can’t see her. “I know.”

On the ride home, after she’s finished talking Alex down with a promise that if Eliza continues being shady she’ll go down and check on her, Kara thinks of the dark haired woman again. She pulls up to the curb of her apartment and squints into the bright of her phone, at her last text to Siobhan. It doesn’t make her body heat with embarrassment to look at it anymore.

Her apartment is a cramped studio with a mattress on a box spring and a pull up bar screwed into the door frame. Kara fixes herself another sandwich, cheese on bread, and eats it over the sink before retreating to her bed and rifling around in her nightstand for her notes from yesterday.

There’s no way she could get into MIT with a journalism degree and a B average from Michigan State and no work experience to speak of. But a mid-level physics course at MIT is close enough to what she was learning as a 13 year old in Krypton to be challenging, so she audits classes to keep herself sharp. There’s not much in the way of mental gymnastics involved in personal training or driving for Uber.

It always helps her out of her funk to focus on the problems she’d copied down from a classmate’s workbook. In the months since she was dumped, Kara’s been thinking more about how she can improve herself as a person. Maybe next semester she’ll take a non-degree seeking course for real credits. Maybe she’ll think about dating again, something that came easy to her. Maybe.

—-

 **To** : Lena.Luthor@mit.Edu  
**From:** LLuthor@gmail.com  
**Subject:** PLEASE READ: cape Cod Disaster!

AirBnb booked a woman into the house ALTHOUGH I told them SPECiFICALLY that it would be unavailable until the 22nd…...who do I call to complain? I am not staying in a hotel.

How are classes? Did you get all As this semester? Bobbi from the club says hi. Please remember to send her a birthday card

Mom

 **To:** Lena.Luthor@Mit.Edu  
**From:** LLuthor@gmail.com  
**Subject:** Re: PLEASE READ: cape Cod Disaster!

The family therapist said that repairing our relationship is a 2 way street which means responding to my emails. The situation is quickly deteriorating, not that you asked, and I was pleased to get your grades from the school. Did you mail a card to bobbi?

Mom

 **To:** Lena.Luthor@Mit.Edu  
**From:** LLuthor@gmail.com  
**Subject:** Re: Re: PLEASE READ: cape Cod Disaster!

I’m sorry that I missed your call. It’s not so bad, actually, Eliza is quite kind.

Mom

 **To:** LLuthor@gmail  
**From:** Lena.luthor@mit.edu  
**Subject:** Re: Re: PLEASE READ: cape Cod Disaster!

Called you again! Who’s Eliza?

L

—-  
Lena sits back in her desk chair and ponders the laptop screen in front of her. The e-mail was two weeks ago and the last time she’d heard from her mother, which would have been par for the course 2 years ago but post-Lex and in the dawn of the new age of their relationship was definitely strange. Lena had called and been patched through to voicemail, emailed, and even texted although Lillian had deigned texting beneath her long before.

“Who’s Eliza?” Lena startles at the sound of crunching and Jess’s voice behind her. The other woman leans over her shoulder and shovels another bite of Cap’n Crunch into her mouth, scanning the computer screen in front of her.

“You scared the shit out of me.” Jess grunts. “I don’t know. Whoever the lady is that double booked the beach house, I guess. I haven’t heard from her since.”

“That’s weird. I thought Lillian was trying to be all kumbaya with you now.”

“She is.” Lena hums, tapping a finger against her chin. Radio silence aside, three weeks was a long time to be in Cape Cod supposedly rooming together in your beach house with a stranger. Lillian is retired technically but still a bit of a Capitol Hill socialite and very rarely takes extended sojourns to the Cape. She thought any vacation more than 3 days was sentimental. “This is bizzaro, right? I would think she was dead except that she posted a picture of the sunset on Facebook yesterday.”

Lena tries to imagine Lillian relaxing at the beach house she remembers from her childhood, tries to imagine her just sitting at the round table of the breakfast nook and sipping a cup of coffee, or walking out onto the private beach barefoot. None of it makes any sense, it doesn’t track with Lena’s earliest memories of Lillian setting up an office in the living room while she and Lex went gallivanting. It didn’t match with the sometimes intemperate rage she would work herself into when they’d ask her to escort them to the ice cream parlor in town. And with the addition of some faceless woman, Eliza, it became absurd.

“Why not just go down there?” Lena’s head swivels to give Jess an incredulous look. “What? I mean, it’s your beach house too. The semester is done for the summer. What are you hanging around for, except Yoga McHottie?”

Lena had been too busy for yoga the past two weeks, but it hadn’t gotten Jess off her back. She figures her roommate had seen her mat and water bottle by the door, waiting for her to go tonight. “Lillian hates surprises.”

“Just tell her the family therapist said it was ok. You need a vacation, dude.”

It does sound nice, sand and reedy grass and a rickety fence running along the back of their small cottage. Lena lets herself briefly fantasize of walking along the shoreline with her sandals in one hand, not worrying about Professor Uschmacher and her dissertation, and finds that she can’t pull herself out of it. “You know what? I do need a vacation.”

“Hell yeah girlfriend.” Jess cheers around a mouthful of cereal. Lena swivels around in her chair and realizes that she’s wearing nothing but a large white robe, hair freshly wet from the shower and dripping all over her bedroom carpet.

“Jess,” She says slowly. “Didn’t we talk about respecting each other’s private space?”

“I thought that was a joke.” Jess deadpans. “I’ve never respected your space since we’ve known each other, why would I start now?”

Lena manages to make it out of the apartment with minimal follow-up teasing. She walks across campus with a newfound sense of verve—it’s empty, quiet, most students having fled for the summer. There’s no longer concern about dodging harried undergrads and the sun is still out despite the late hour, warming Lena’s bare arms. For the first time in several months she’s looking forward to something. She’ll pack a bag for the week and just relax. On the beach, in town, at the house.

Maybe it’s her own shift in mood, but Kara looks brighter as well. She’s wearing a work out set with little pineapples on it and she makes clear, deliberate eye contact with Lena when she walks into the studio, followed by a smile that Lena feels straight between her legs. They’ve caught eyes before but she’s never been on the receiving end of acknowledgement from Kara.

It doesn’t let on as the class moves forward. She can feel Kara’s eyes on her, the heat of her attention, and it makes it doubly embarrassing that she still falls face first in crow. It might be that she’s not been into class in 2 weeks, but why would Kara notice one student out of probably dozens skipping a couple of work outs? Lena starts to think that her doctor may have had a point because she’s not sure that her body is going to survive the combined strain of Kara’s interest and physical stress.

—-

It’s definitely a sign. A second chance. The woman hadn’t come into class for two weeks after she’d initially caught Kara’s interest which felt like a signal in its own right. But here she is today, heart slamming as hard as usual, and maybe more pronounced because Kara can’t keep her eyes off of her. Now that she’s talked the woman up to herself in her head, played out a dozen scenarios where they talk and then Kara takes her home, all she can focus on is how attractive she is.

This is also her last class before she travels up the Cape for the week to check up on Eliza. Apparently she’d told Alex that she dropped her phone in the ocean, but her sister wasn’t buying it (“Since when does mom go swimming?”). If anything, it was a good excuse for a vacation, and since Kara has no full time job it’s not like she has not much reason not to go. So the fact that the dark haired woman picked today of all days to come, well. It must be serendipity or something like it.

She’s made up her mind by the end of class, when everybody else is filtering out but the woman is lingering, packing up her things slowly, and making an obvious effort to keep her eyes directed at the floor. Kara feels like approaching too quickly would startle her off so she just stands for a moment, chewing her lip and thinking about what to say, what a good line would be. Previously girls approached her, mostly. Siobhan got her attention by cornering her at a girls night at a local bar, making her interest well known. In college it was much of the same—she never had an issue getting dates.

Kara steels herself as the woman slings her mat over her shoulder and starts walking for the door. “Hey! Uh, wait up.” The woman looks over her shoulder and raises her eyebrows, running one hand over the strap of her mat. Her heartbeat grows to a crescendo loud enough that Kara has to squeeze her eyes shut and recalibrate. “I’m Kara. You come to this class all the time but I don’t think we’ve spoken before.” She extends her hand.

Lena’s eyes dart from Kara’s proffered palm to her face and back again. She rubs again at her strap, wipes one hand down the front of her yoga pants, then clasps Kara’s in her own. Her grip is a little damp and over-tight. Instead of putting her off it makes Kara’s stomach flutter. “Lena.”

What a good name, fitting for the person in front of her. Now that Kara knows it she feels stupid for not having guessed it right away, that she’s a Lena. She drops her hand and situates it onto one of her hips, hoping it looks more casual than it feels. “Well, uh. I’m not trying to...put you on the spot or anything, but I’ve noticed you kind of struggling.” Lena’s mouth parts and her brows furrow. Her posture, already that of a deer ready to sprint, folds further inward. Kara hastens to clarify. “Not in a bad way! Yoga is hard. I just wanted to say, I’m a personal trainer. If you ever wanted a couple like...private classes.” Kara clears her throat. “Free of charge.”

“Oh.” Lena’s thought process is clear and present on her face. She readjusts her strap for the millionth time, now clutching it with both hands so tightly that her knuckles are white. “C-cool. Yeah. Um. That sounds...great. Awesome. Totally.”

“Can I give you my number?” Lena starts nodding her head and doesn’t stop. Kara wants to put her hand on her chin to spare the joint in her neck and barely resists, biting her lip. By the time Lena has fumbled her phone out of her yoga pants and opened up her contacts her face is red as a different sun and her hands have a slight tremor.

“Here.” Kara takes the phone and punches her name and number in, ducking her head to hide her smile. “Just text me so I have yours. I’ll be out of town for a little while, but maybe next week?”

“Perfect. Next week sounds perfect.”

“Great. Well, I’m just gonna.” Kara gestures back to where her things are still piled at the front of the studio. Lena shakes her head, smiling.

“Of course. Yeah. I’ll...text you, then.”

“Looking forward to it.”

Lena departs the room with a small wave and a grimace, door slamming behind her. Using your superpowers to spy on other people is wrong, wrong, wrong. Then again, a small peek can’t hurt. She hears Lena standing outside of the door, rustling around in her backpack, then thumbs punching numbers into a phone and a foot tapping over ringing.

“Jess, you’re not gonna believe this.”

Kara’s face breaks out into a grin. That she could have heard without her powers.

—-

A person could start smelling the brine of the ocean about 20 minutes out from the beach house. It’s a smell that triggers something in Lena. It makes her want to stick her head out of her car window like a dog and take deep, gulping breaths of air, soak it in as much as possible.

Jess, although happy to see her go, keeps her hanging around the apartment with lunch and girl talk and sets Lena off her ideal departure time. She and Kara had texted a little, setting up a date for their personal training session, and Jess was there to hang on every word. By the time she’s out of the house the sun is starting to set, and when she’s cruising through the main drag of Brewster it’s well dark outside.

Lena had called Lillian several times before her departure and calls her again sitting in the parking lot of her favorite pizza joint scarfing down a slice of cheese. It rings through to voicemail, as per usual, and Lena grunts in frustration. At least she had a key to the house so it wouldn’t matter if she was there or not but still. How bizarre.

Foreboding starts to set in earnest when she cruises up to the front of the house. It’s small when compared to Lillian’s other tastes, tall and skinny with brown shingles to keep in line with the Homeowners Association. There are large, steep stairs leading up to the upper level which is technically where the living room, kitchen and main bedrooms are. The garage and bunk room sit below.

There are three cars in the driveway. Two makes sense, sort of, if that other woman is still staying there. Did they have guests? Lena’s not sure of Lillian would pal around with anybody who drove a Ford made before 2015. All of the lights seem to be on so at least somebody is home. Lena just hopes she’s not walking straight into some kind of bizarre situation.

She kills the ignition and sits in the dark of the driveway for a few minutes, thinking. Something about it feels off. Why would her mother decide to stay in that house with a strange woman for three weeks? Why was she posting pictures of herself drinking martinis at a tiki bar on FaceBook but not returning her messages? The more she thinks about it the stranger it becomes.

On her way up the steps to the front door, Lena considers any number of things. Robbers. A hostage situation. Invasion of the body snatchers. She hears laughter when she steps into the front porch and it sets off her fight or flight response—she would never describe her mother as a laugher.

She’s worked it up so thoroughly in her head that when she knocks and her yoga instructor answers the door, she almost laughs out loud. Kara looks at her wide-eyed, beer in one hand and the doorknob in the other. Two women sit on the couch behind her, Lillian and the person who Lena presumes is Eliza. Lena isn’t sure what to say first.

“Lena?” Kara says. “What are you doing here?”

“Mom? How do you know my yoga instructor?” Lena is looking straight over Kara’s shoulder at her mother’s shocked face. This is the first and maybe only time she’s ever caught Lillian Luthor off her game, and she would relish in it more if she herself weren’t knocked so off kilter.

“Wait, Lillian’s your mom?” Kara’s look of confusion morphs into an earnest smile. She turns to point at the blonde woman sitting adjacent. “Eliza’s my mom. Gosh, small world huh?”

Lena has to agree with her on that front. The world, in this moment, had never seemed smaller.

 


	2. with your mother on the sandy lawn

No amount of red wine is going to fix this headache. All Lillian had wanted was a vacation, damnit. What was the use of having a house on the Cape, private beach included, if you couldn’t go every once and a while? Not that Lillian took very much advantage while she was working, and the house had later served as a place for Alexander to take his friends during spring break, and then after—well, nobody had much of a taste for it, after.

Lillian’s headache intensifies. She presses her fingers to her temples and regards the woman standing in front of her, shoulders straight, one hand clasped in the other and held in front of her body. Her blonde hair is passed over one shoulder, and she’s wearing a kiss the cook apron. Strange, because she doesn’t have anybody in the kitchen to wear it for, and Lillian knows for a fact that it’s not an item she’d left in the kitchen for the odd kitsch-minded AirBnB guest. “I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”

“Eliza.” The woman answers with an almost imperceptible wring of her hands. Almost, except that Lillian perceives everything.

“Eliza.” Lillian begins, trying to keep the irritation from her voice, or at least veil it behind something. The family therapist had told her that her intensity could sometimes be off-putting, and though she wasn’t hugely concerned with what Eliza thought of her, she’d promised Lena that she would try. And that, she supposed, meant that she had to try whether Lena was there to see her do it or not. Self-improvement could be so hugely inconvenient. “I’m sorry, but there seems to have been some kind of mix-up. I meant to black these dates out so nobody could book them.”

“So you’re saying—“

“I can find you any other house on the Cape. Or refund your money

“I understand.” She turns to glance over her shoulder and that’s when Lillian realizes that the kitchen smells scrumptious. Like chicken and herbs and something else, and Eliza has a half glass of red wine next to a bottle on the counter. “But I can’t drive at night—Cambridge is 2 hours away anyway.” Right. Of course Lillian can’t insist that somebody vacate their home on short notice in the middle of the night because of a mistake that wasn’t, technically speaking, their fault. She’s bettering herself as a person. If only this had happened two years ago. “Dinner is almost finished, I’ve got plenty of wine. Why don’t you,” Eliza waves her hand around. “Join me? And I’ll pack up my things tomorrow morning and find something else.”

The thought of having dinner with a stranger makes Lillian consider just turning around and going home. But her growling stomach reminds her that she hasn’t eaten since brunch that afternoon, and whatever Eliza is making smells better and better by the minute. She’s sure the wine won’t be up to her standards, but a thirsty woman in the desert must have whatever water is offered to her. Her eyes focus on the label of the bottle on the counter, ready to have a good chuckle. “Oh my God, is that a 2012 Pahlmeyer?”

Eliza smiles.

They have more in common than just the wine, as it turns out. Eliza also has two children, one adopted. Hers are daughters, a secret desire of Lillian’s since she was small. She’d hoped fiercely when she was pregnant with Alexander, that he would be a girl, and later on considered that she’d wanted it too much for it to happen. Then Lionel confessed his affair, and Lena, and she’d fought the bile in her throat to be excited about her secret wish come true. Where she’d left Alexander’s nursery to an interior designer, Lillian decorated Lena’s bedroom herself. She picked out her clothes by hand. Lena had hated them all, of course.

“It's not that Kara isn’t smart. She’s brilliant. She’s just…” Eliza swirls around the wine in her glass, staring into it. “...lost, right now. Ever since my husband died--”

  
“Your husband passed?” Lillian interrupts her, looking up from her own, nearly finished meal. She hasn’t cleared a plate of food since the 80’s. “I apologize. That was sudden. I just meant to say, mine passed recently as well.”

“Oh.” Eliza nods her head. “You understand, then. It has a way of leaving you a bit adrift.”

Lillian studies Eliza’s face and finds with surprise that she’s no longer a stranger.

—-

“Here!” Lena knows that Kara is above her and can hear the smile in her voice. She doesn’t look up when she accepts the beer. The label is soggy from moisture in her palm. Her eyes are trained ahead of them, at Lillian and Eliza, sitting a polite distance apart, avoiding each other’s gaze and everybody else’s in the room. The hairs on the back of Lena’s neck are on end.

“So.” The couch cushions shift next to her as Kara sits, close enough that their thighs are touching although the space is plenty big. “How did you two, uh. Meet?”

Lillian and Eliza exchange a glace and then look away as if burned by a hot iron. Lena is reaching Sixth Sense levels of full-body something is wrong here chills.

“My mom booked the house on a date your mom was going to come up. They hit it off and now they’re friends. Pretty crazy.” Kara shifts her body somewhat toward Lena and moves one of her arms over the back of the couch, bracketing her shoulders. “And now you’re here, which is super lucky.”

Lillian pauses her intense study of the wall clock to zero in on Kara’s body language with narrowed eyes. “You said that Kara is your yoga instructor?”

Lena tries to keep her face as placid as the surface of a lake despite the traitorous red that she knows is creeping up her chest. She hasn’t quite reached Lillian’s level of monkish control over her bodily tells. Kara hasn’t moved her arm and Lena isn’t sure if she can deal with the onslaught of questioning while also in such close proximity. “Yeah. She’s been helping me improve my form.”

“She’s a fast learner.” Kara flashes her teeth and Lillian’s look turns deadly suspicious. Lena is on the verge of turning the bottle in her hand to glass shards.

“Well!” Eliza seems to snap out of a trance and shakes up the room by patting her hands on her thighs. Lena hasn’t paid much attention to her aside from her attachment to Lillian, but sees now that she’s wearing a simple wrap dress, pink in a way that brings out her complexion. She’s pretty like Kara, and her nails are plain but well kempt. Not polished but not bitten either. “I think our girls coming to visit calls for a little celebration. We have those steaks in the fridge that we were saving for Sunday…”

The way she says it, says we, and looks to Lillian for validation—Lena is surprised that every hair on her head isn’t standing straight up. She looks over at Kara, hoping to catch her in a similar state of what is going on? But the other woman is smiling around the lip of her bottle, crinkle forming at the corners of her eyes.

“I’ve been craving steak all week, how’d you know?”

Lillian keeps giving Lena her patented we’ll talk later look over the top of Kara and Eliza’s heads while they bustle in the kitchen. It’s a look Lena is intimate with, knows it from when she was still being broken of her discourteous upbringing. She would ever again mistake a salad fork for an entree fork because of that look. Her mother could pack infinite crossness into the creases on her face.

Eliza, however, keeps up a stream of chatter while they work on dinner. Kara puts on some soft music, and offers Lena another beer before she even realizes that she’s finished hers. She still isn’t certain if Kara is aware of the tension, or Eliza, but the latter keeps asking her questions about what she does at MIT like this is a normal and expected occurrence.

“Your mother tells me that you’re getting your PhD in bioengineering.” Eliza says with the kind of warmth that screams how cool without her needing to verbalize it. Kara’s head pops up from where she’s placing one of the steaks in a marinade, shirtsleeves up about her shoulders.

“Wow, seriously?” Some of her blonde hair has fallen from her ponytail and hangs in front of her forehead. “You never told me that.”

“Oh. It’s not really a big deal.” Lena is flush with pleasure. Her eyes flick over to Lillian, who’s pouring a glass of red wine and not looking at any of them. Her heart cools. “I haven’t even figured who’s going to advise my dissertation yet.”

“Well, I for one think it’s really something.” Eliza is looking at Lillian and Lillian is looking at her wine and Kara is looking at Lena, still wrists deep in marinade. All at once Lena is in the Bermuda Triangle of unspoken bullshit, and she wishes more than anything that Kara would give her any indication that they’re on the same page. “Wouldn’t you agree, Lilian?”

“Lena seems to be doing very well in her program. MIT is an appropriately prestigious school for her.” Lillian cradles her chin in her hand and looks back at Eliza with a spark of defiance. “But she should start thinking of her dissertation soon, unless she wants to be caught unawares.”

“Thanks for the advice, mom.” In her mind, Lena watches herself turning around and walking out the door, getting into her car and driving straight back to Cambridge. She thinks it so hard she can feel the whip of the wind from her cracked window. The road is in front of her and her knuckles are white at 10-and-2 on the wheel.

“I thought we could eat on the back porch tonight.” Eliza ventures. “It’s warm for this early in the season.”

They open the French doors the connect the small indoor dining room to the back porch. Eliza and Lillian go to set places because some things never change and Lillian Luthor would never eat a meal at an improperly placed table. Lena lingers in the kitchen with Kara, finishing one beer and accepting another. At least it’s Bud, glorified piss water, or she might really be drunk.

Kara washes her hands with dish soap once she’s done and put the steaks in the fridge to soak. Lena is unused to seeing her out of a perky workout set, but her casual clothes are fitting. Joggers and a button down with an obnoxious floral print, some soft looking zip up. “Your mom is really nice.” Lena starts, at a loss for anything else. Kara doesn’t seem too hung up on it.

“I raised her well.” She simpers, drying her hands on a dishcloth. Something passes over her face and she turns, leaning against the farmhouse sink with her hands pinned behind her back and looking at Lena. The color of her obnoxious print shirt peeks above the all the way zipped hoodie. “You’re going to stay for a while, right?”

“I don’t know.” Lena admits. “I packed for at least a week, but—“

“But what?”

“You’re not getting, like, a weird vibe?” Kara casts a glance over her shoulder and out the window, to where Lillian and Eliza are setting plates on a round wooden table. “I mean. The whole situation is kind of...off.”

“I guess.” She still doesn’t look perturbed. “But—there’s been some family drama, recently. She’s been looking for a friend.” Outside, Eliza laughs, high and bright. Lillian is smirking, and she says something too quiet for either of them to hear. “If she’s found somebody she likes, I’m happy.”

It’s not like Lena can argue with that. Whatever their relationship is, it's been a long time since she’s seen her mother out of a blazer and with her shoulders relaxed. “Anyway, it doesn’t hurt that you’re her daughter.”

Lena blinks back into reality and sees Kara regarding her through her glasses. She’s half-diffident, half-full of bravado. Jess’s spirit on her shoulder tells her to say something as offhand and flirtatious. Lena just smiles tightly, listening to the sound of her mother telling a joke of all things to Kara’s mother, and laughs a little. “How long are those steaks supposed to sit for?”

“I really hope you’ll stay for a while.” Kara takes the glass baking dish from the fridge, fingers clearing the condensation in five oblong shapes. The glass bulb lights on the porch railing go on and Eliza yells for Kara to bring the Bluetooth speaker out with her, and that the grill is hot.

“I’ll think about it.” Lena responds, and follows her out.

—

Eliza doesn’t leave the next day, or any of the ones following. It takes Lillian exactly a week to admit to herself that she’s not just being polite by allowing her to continue to sleep in the house. She catches herself on a breezy Friday afternoon, French doors open to allow the air to pass, making two martinis instead of just one without being asked. Through the window, her eyes stick to Eliza. She’s leaning on the railing, dress in disarray with the wind, playing around her legs. That stupid ocher hair of hers is kept neat in a low ponytail, obscuring her back.

Lillian holds the shaker so tightly it slips from her grasp like a rocket, crashing to the floor and splashing vodka and olive juice everywhere.

What twisted luck landed her here, with a brilliant woman, Lillian can’t be sure. It takes a week to admit to herself that she’s come to look forward to her evenings on the couch debating politics and the finer points of quantum entanglement. It takes a day after that for her to realize that she hasn’t felt this way since boarding school—or, at least, hasn’t acted on it. She’d liked blondes then, too.

The rules of engagement are surely different now than they were in 1975, but some things have remained true. Lillian has had countless trysts and fooled a man into thinking she loved him for decades, so decoding Eliza’s searching looks is as easy as the turn of a key. It was improper for women to dabble in such things as passion after a certain age and the death of one’s husband, but—

“Do you mind if I put on a record?” Eliza stoops over the crate of records next to the player, hair tucked behind one ear. Lillian sees the glint of an earring. “Oh! Otis Redding.” She pulls the sleeve out, tilts it to get a good look, then holds it to her chest with a beam in Lillian’s direction. Her eyes crinkle prettily.

Some rules were meant to be broken, weren’t they?

  
—

Kara manages to eat an entire steak, a side salad, a baked potato, and still cast longing glances at what Lena has left on her plate. Lena prefers to drink her calories, especially in light of the confrontation she’s sure is coming. Eliza and Kara have carried the diner conversation—and pleasantly, too. Lena is genuinely curious about Eliza’s research work, and Kara’s childhood shenanigans cause a pull of endearment in her chest. Especially when Kara looks down at her plate with a grin tugging at her mouth, cowed by her mother’s love. Or, foster mother. Lena isn’t quite sure.

Lillian has nothing to contribute. Even when Eliza tries to goad her into talking—“Oh, Lillian, tell the girls about that fishing boat crew we ran into at Flanagan’s!”—she remains silent, scarcely touching her food. “Why don’t me and Kara do the washing up.” Eliza says when they’ve cleared their plates. “And you and Lillian can stay out here.”

“Oh no, I can help—“

“Sweetie, don’t be ridiculous. You’ve barely gotten a moment to catch up.”

“Yeah, totally.” Kara starts gathering plates with her mother, taking all four at once and holding a couple glasses in her armpit almost boastfully. “We can figure out the sleeping stuff, too.” Lena hears her say to Eliza as they retreat to the kitchen, Eliza shutting the doors behind them with a soft latching sound. There’s a beat of silence.

“What on earth are you doing here?” Lillian hisses, leaning forward and across the table. It’s shocking, on reflection, that Lena hadn’t predicted this reaction from her. As if a few months of therapy would change everything.

“It’s good to see you too, mom.” She responds, looking down at her half-empty plate. Her hand grips her beer and finds it empty--where is Kara with her sixth sense for refreshing drinks? In front of her, Lillian winces and backs off, grasping the paper towel in front of her with both hands. She twists it, folds it, and finally crumples it and throws it down on her plate. A breath is taken in, held, and exhaled. Just like Dr. Meyer had gone over with them.

“I didn’t mean it like that.” Lillian says finally, eyes closed like she’s visualizing herself in a better place than this. Just like Lena is. “I just meant--you could have called. It’s not a good time.”

“I did call.” Lena balks, hand tightening on her empty drink. “Inconvenient because you’re too busy here shacked up with a strange woman to pick up the phone?”

“Don’t be crass. Don’t call her strange.” That frustration is back on her face. Lillian’s shoulders are square, in stark contrast to how she’d looked earlier, making Eliza laugh. “I raised you better than to be rude.”

“I’m confused.” Lena insists. “I just want to know what’s going on. It’s weird, mom.”

  
“Eliza and I met, and now we’re friends, and we’ve been spending time together.”

  
“But you have friends. Bobbi, the girls. You’re a daughter of the American revolution.”

“You know as well as I do that they haven’t called me in months and months.” Lena hadn’t known, but she’d suspected. Lillian and her prowess at keeping up a facade continued like things were normal, sending out reminders for birthday cards and talking about her social life in therapy. But Lena knew more than most that her mother was like an endless line of curtains opening into each other. If you pulled back one you would inevitably find another. “Eliza is nice to me. She doesn’t care about all of--all of that. What do I have at home more than that?”

She’s never seen her mother so backed in a corner before, equal parts guarded and vulnerable. Her words sound like Lena is forcing them out of her, like she’d rather have her teeth pulled than admit to having a friend or a tender feeling. “God, mom. I’m--you’re right. I’m sorry.” As soon as Lena says it, offers Lillian the vindication she’s so obviously been fishing for, the other woman straightens up and nods her head once.

“I’m obviously pleased that you’re here.” She says, not looking at Lena. “And I hope you’ll stay for a little while. Especially now that your friend is here.”

“We don’t really know each other that well.”

“Oh?” Lillian’s eyes flick up. “It certainly looked like you did. Well. Anyway. I’d better help Eliza with the dishes.

She exits, leaving Lena alone at the table, waves crashing behind her.

\---

They cruise through four records and two martinis a piece, visiting Otis Redding’s twice. Sitting side by side, nursing a healthy buzz, Lillian’s gaze lingering on the birthmark exposed by Eliza’s hemline.

“Trickle down economics is a fallacy.” Eliza says over the rim of her glass, spilling a little vodka over. She plucks an olive out with her fingers, putting the tips in her mouth to suck the drink off when she eats it. Her feet are propped on the coffee table, toes dancing to the beat of the music in her socks. “I would expect a woman who went to Yale to know that.”

“You never told me you were a lightweight.”

Eliza scoffs. “I’m not drunk.” A little more liquid spills from the rim of her glass. “I’m not very drunk.”

Lillian laughs and the other woman looks at her, contented. Her cheeks are colored with alcohol and her eyes are hazy. “It’s alright. You can be drunk.”

“I suspect I haven’t had as much practice as you.” Eliza says, tilting her head back on the couch. “Being a socialite and all.”

“It started long before I was a socialite.” The record comes to a crinkled stop and Lillian rises, moving to her records to select another. She can feel Eliza’s gaze on her back as her fingers flick through them, seeing and not seeing at the same time. Her attention is rooted on that couch, next to that woman. “How do you feel about Etta James?”

“Wonderful.” Lillian drifts back to the couch. “I thought you were always a socialite.”

“What?”

“What you said earlier. That it started before you were—“ Eliza’s hand moves around. “The way you act, I would have thought you were born that way. You just seem like a woman who knows what it’s like to have a cotillion.”

“I went to boarding school on scholarship.” Lillian has no conception of what’s possessed her to say these things. The only people who know this about her are Marlene Brown and the admissions board for St. Andrew’s school in 1974. “It was always just myself and my mother.”

“She must have been sad when you left for school, then.”

Lillian thinks of Marlene, the hard set of her face, how little she’d grown to look like her. How resentful she was of the things Lillian inherited from the father she’d never met. She told me on my 8th birthday that if abortions were cheap I’d never have been born is the answer on the tip of Lillian’s tongue. “She did alright for herself.”

“You know, I always wanted to go to boarding school when I was little.” Eliza admits. She’s set her drink down on the coffee table and has her hands tucked in her lap. “Is it everything it’s cracked up to be in the movies?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” A smile tugs at Lillian’s mouth. “Sneaking around, drinking. Making love on the roof of the cloisters. I suppose it was.”

She watches as Eliza’s face goes to impressive lengths to stay impassive. Lillian would be lying if she said she didn’t drop that particular piece of information to test the waters, see if it was alright to even begin wading in. Eliza isn’t meeting her gaze, which could be a good or a bad thing.

“You mean with the other girls at your school.”

“Sure.” Lillian responds easily. Eliza does look at her then, head still tipped back on the couch, cheeks still bright, eyes too. The song on the record changes to the opening strains of At Last, and it’s as if the room shifts into a different plane of existence.

“My husband never liked Etta James.”

Lillian makes an indignant noise. “What, did he hate music?”

“Sort of. He said he didn’t understand it.” Eliza regards her as evenly and clearly as a person ever has. Her eyes stick in Lillian’s heart like a pin through a butterfly’s wings. “I didn’t really either, until recently.”

Lillian kisses her then, at a funny angle and indecent like she’s 16, tasting vodka and olive juice all the while. She kisses her to strip that flavor away and leave Eliza at her foundations. In the background, the record finishes and makes the noise of nails on a cotton shirt, bumping every few seconds as it spins and spins.

\---

“This place is pretty cool.” Having spent so much time preoccupied with her mother, Lena has neglected so spare much thought to where they would sleep for the week. Or to Kara, or the fact that Kara is there, and that the only bedroom left is the bunk room in the basement meaning they’ll be sleeping there together. She’s leading Kara down a narrow staircase, arms piled with pillows and sheets for the beds, wishing she’d had more time to prepare. “When did your mom get it?”

“Before I was born.” Lena says. “I’ve spent every summer out here for as long as I can remember.” They reach the bottom of the stairs, the basement forking off into a large games room with two doors. One to the garage, one to the bunk room. Lena’s room, really, since Lex hadn’t slept down there since he hit puberty.

She presses open the door, Kara at her heels, and flicks on the wall light. It looks exactly the same as it did the last time she was there, almost 2 years ago. The bunk bed set pressed against the wall with two bare mattresses, a bookshelf full of more nick nacks and games then books. If she was there alone she could close her eyes and see Lex leaning off the top bunk and teasing her with some scary story.

“You can hear the ocean really well from here.” Kara says. The singular window over the bookshelf is whispering with the sound of the tide. Lena watches as she moves to it, braces her hands on the top, and cranes her head for a better look. “I bet you had some crazy parties.”

Lena laughs, depositing the load of linens on the floor and gathering one to fix the bottom bunk with. “Crazy parties aren’t really my speed.”

“No?” Kara turns, brow arched, then her gaze falls to the sheets that Lena’s arranging on the bed and her lips fold into a smirk. Lena follows her eyes and realizes that she’s using her Star Wars set, flushing hot. “I see.”

“That’s not—they’re Lex’s, not mine.”

“Oh.” Kara is looking at her and it drives home how unprepared Lena was for this confrontation. All night they’ve had the buffer of their mothers and of their shared cosmic happenstance. But here it’s just her, Kara, her snitching sheets. And Kara’s eyes are honest to God twinkling when she says: “That’s too bad. I love Star Wars.”

“Did I say they’re Lex’s? They’re mine.” Lena salvages, popping the last corner of the fitted sheet over the mattress. Kara reaches behind her on the bookshelf and snatches up the magic 8 ball that rests there, giving it a shake.

“Oh wise and knowing spirits...is Lena lying to impress me?”

Lena barks out a laugh from her perch at the top bunk. “Well, did it sell me out?”

“That’s between me and the netherworld.”

Yesterday, when the world existed in a different timeline, Lena had stressed endlessly with Jess over what would happen if she hung out with Kara and they didn’t click, or didn’t have anything to talk about. Her small sample size of boys who had taken her on dates informed Lena of absolutely nothing. That memory makes her current state of sitting with Kara and clicking with her, no small talk, no bland get to know you questions, even more surreal. It’s just Kara asking a magic 8 ball if she’s going to get to eat nachos tomorrow and Lena nearly not finishing the beds because she’s laughing so hard.

“Ok, magic 8 ball. Is Lena a top bunk kind of girl?” Kara looks at Lena while she shakes it, still propped up against the bookshelf. Lena reclines on the top bunk, head cradled in one of her hands, regarding her with interest. It’s getting late and her sleepiness is running into her half-drunkenness. Still, her excitement has a sharp edge that keeps her alert, and the night feels full of possibilities. “It says ‘try again later’.”

“I like the top.” Lena offers. Kara’s face twists like she wants to make a comment but is holding it in.

Kara slips into the upstairs bathroom to change, leaving Lena to her devices. She grimaces at her ratty sweatpants and camp T-shirt, and realizing that it’s too late for regrets whips off her bra and throws them on. Kara appears just after in adorable little shorts that hug the muscles of her thighs and a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off shirt from the $10 rack of Target.

Lena is sitting on the edge of the upper bunk, playing on her phone. Kara looks dumbstruck in the doorway and she puzzles over it until she follows her gaze to where her breasts are straining against the slightly too small material of her T-shirt (camp was a long time ago), nipples pebbling obviously. Instead of being embarrassed, Lena has a little burst of pride. She revels in knowing that Kara notices her like that.

“Hey so, uh.” Kara shakes her head like a cartoon character, but when she blinks back into reality she’s still talking into Lena’s chest. “I brought my iPad with me. If you wanted we could, like, watch a show in my bunk or something.”

Sex is one of the strongest biological imperatives that human beings face. Eat, survive, mate—Lena is no fool. She knows what would happen if she got down into that bunk with Kara. She’s surprised to find herself keen on it, some switch in her biological make up flipped on in the same way Kara’s apparently has been. Whatever mixture of pheromones, aesthetics, and evolutionary motivation needs to steep for sexual attraction to manifest has happened. A textbook in one of Lena’s biology classes had called it erotic capital.

She watches Kara’s biceps flex absently through the sleeves in her T-shirt. Indeed.

“I’m kind of tired.” Despite all this, Lena isn’t sure that she’s the kind of girl who sleeps with somebody she barely knows. Which isn’t to say that she knows what kind of girl she is, full stop, but she’s finding things out piece by piece. “Maybe we can just talk for a little while before bed.”

If Kara is disappointed, she doesn’t show it. She hits the light by the door and flounces into bed with a bounce that Lena can feel on the top bunk. “Hey this mattress is pretty comfy—woah!”

Lena notices it at the same time Kara does, and she has a moment of disbelief that they’re still affixed to the ceiling. Hundreds of stars, meticulously created with glow in the dark paint, twinkle over their heads. “Me and Lex got bored a lot as kids.”

“Are they—they’re constellations, right?”

“Yeah.” Lex had followed the map she’d plotted out with the tip of a craft store paintbrush. She’d called him out whenever he placed a shape slightly off from the coordinates she created, and he called her bratty with a laugh. Part of her wonders that they didn’t disappear with Lex. But that’s the nature of the heavens, Lena supposes, to stay long after other things have come and died and been born again. “I love stars. I wanted to work at NASA when I was little.”

“I love them too.” Kara’s voice is barely a whisper.

“Oh wise and knowing spirits.” Lena says, looking at her creation dimming without the charge of sunlight. “Is Kara lying to impress me?”

Beneath her, a laugh, sheets rustling. “Reply hazy, try again later.”

—-

Lena’s bladder wakes her late in the night, after dozing off in the middle of a conversation with Kara about the finer qualities of MIT’s dining hall. The woman in question is still beneath her, snoring softly. Lena smiles.

She swings her legs around the side of the bunk and traipses down softly, careful not to wake Kara. Knowing the house as well as she does, Lena navigates it alright in the dark, finding her way to the stairs and ascending them with light feet. The upstairs living room and kitchen are quiet but for the hum of the fridge and dark except for the green light of the microwave clock.

A short hallway turns the living room into an “L” shape and leads to the two other bedrooms and only bathroom in the house. It’s there, opening the bathroom door and half-stepped inside, that Lena realizes the door to the room her mother was supposedly staying in is wide open. She knits her brow and glances around, as if she’s going to find Lillian in the bathroom, and then backpedals into the living room to see if she’d somehow missed her there. No dice, and the back deck and beach below are empty as well.

There is one other option but Lena can’t even name it in her head, just like she couldn’t begin to think of it while they were all sitting on the couch. She cranes her head into the bedroom and sees that the duvet hasn’t been disturbed, as if Lillian never slept there at all.

Then, the thing that she refuses to name names itself for her. From the background there’s a breathy giggle, then a moan, then the sound of bedsprings slowly and agonizingly squeaking. Lena claps a hand over her mouth in horror, her mind flicking through every other possible scenario including sex ghosts and horny burglars until—

“You have to be quiet, the girls are downstairs.” That is her mother’s voice. Her amorous, silky voice cooing to the only other person in this house—Kara’s mother. Lena’s eyes nearly fall out of her head onto the floor. “I think Lena might be onto us.”

Damn straight I’m onto you! Lena thinks. She uses the bathroom because a full bladder doesn’t stop in a crisis, plugging her ears the whole time. She then tiptoes through the living room, hand still over mouth to stymie any anguished noises that might escape, and down to the bunk room.

Kara is still there, on her back with her body flung open in sleep. One leg has fallen off the side of the bed, one arm is framing her head, and she’s adorably tangled in a child’s comforter covered in pictures of R2D2. Lena’s body registers butterflies before she remembers the sound of her mother giggling and stomps them down.

On the top bunk, Lena listens to the raspy melody of Kara’s breath and tries to forget what she’d heard, even just for the night. Every time she begins to slip into unconsciousness the sound of her mother’s breathy groan stirs her back awake. She gives up after dawn begins to filter in from the window and lays awake, forming a plan.


	3. the linens you're sittin' on

Kara Danvers has a dream in 3 scenes that night. In the first, she’s bringing Siobhan to her apartment for the first time. It’s the night of their first date, and despite a rocky start and a stomach full of butterflies she’s managed to pull her car up to the curb and say the words “Wanna come up for a coffee?” Like a heartthrob in a Meg Ryan movie. Siobhan isn’t always kind to her, but she’s kind on this occasion, and she says yes.

When she looks behind her on the staircase Siobhan is Lena and Lena is smiling up at her. The light around them is red, as if the lightbulbs in the hallway have all been changed. It highlights Lena’s hair. Kara wants to comment on this, but instead she says: “Come in.” And opens her apartment door.

They step into her apartment, as tidy as it’s ever looked, still bathed in red light. When Kara turns to ask about the coffee, Lena is holding a bouquet of flowers, which she extends into the space between them. “I brought these for you.”

“Thank you.” Kara takes them, and holds them in her hands without crushing them. They’re a kind she’s never seen before, but recognizes vaguely, as if from a far-off dream. She holds them to her face and smells them and holds their scent in her heart, and when she blinks into wakefulness that freshness is still in the air around her. It takes her a moment to adjust to seeing the slats above her head and the sound of the ocean just outside the window.

“Lena?” But she isn’t in the bunk above her. Kara notes with mirth that her bed has been impeccably made. She adds it to the fastidious map of stars above her head and Lena’s plate last night where she’d portioned and separated her foods, without looking down, while holding a conversation with Eliza about theoretical principles in engineering. In the less than 24 hours they’ve been together Lena has revealed herself in ways big and small and Kara isn’t sure she could describe her in adjectives, but in the expressive things that she does, maybe.

She’s never had a friend quite like her before. Alex is smart, but sometimes lacking in charm, a product of working in a morgue. Lucy, Winn, and James are wonderful in their own ways, but Kara can already tell that Lena is going to occupy an uncommon place in her life. There’s something about her, about the way they’d connected that night, that trips a sixth sense in her.

Upstairs, both of the bedroom doors are closed and Lena is sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the New York Times spread in front of her. Her hair is up in a messy bun and she’s wearing a blanket like a shawl over her pajamas. Underneath the softness of her position her shoulders are tense and her posture is stiff. 

“Good morning.” Lena says without looking up. “There’s coffee in the pot.”

“You’re up early.” Kara notes that neither of their mothers have emerged. She reaches in an upper cabinet for some Crate and Barrel stoneware mug and fills it with coffee that she doctors with cream and sugar. Her body metabolizes caffeine, like everything else, too quickly for her feel it. It’s the nature of the human ritual that Kara is attracted to. She has a French press at her house that she uses for the experience of control, to push the plunger down with enough finesse that it doesn’t slam through her kitchen counter.

She looks over her shoulder at the ill defined shape of Lena’s back. Kara can think of other things she’d like to touch with that kind of carefulness.

“It’s nearly 9:30.”

This jolts Kara out of her reverie. She looks at the clock hanging in the living room to confirm. Her lips thin. “Weird. Mom’s usually an early riser.” Socked feet make a muted noise as Kara moves to sit across from Lena at the table. The other woman isn’t looking her in the eye. Or at all, really. She’s been reading the same article about Reince Priebus since Kara got there. “Can I have the sports section?”

Wordlessly, Lena offers it to her. Kara doesn’t actually read the sports section of anything unless it’s of the _Illustrated_ variety, but when in Rome. “Kara.” Kara’s eyes lift and find that Lena is finally looking at her and man, have her eyes always been that green? She can’t keep the stupid grin off her face when she sees her tempered as she is from sleep.

“Yeah?” Lena opens and closes her mouth and her eyes flick back and forth between Kara’s. There’s a thin live wire running across the table between them, same as there was that day in the yoga studio, same as when they’d slept stacked on each other the previous night. Lena’s ring finger plays with the corner of her newspaper. “Lena?”

“Sorry.” Her tongue breaches the seam of her lips, wets them, and disappears. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about before they get up.”

“You gonna take me up on those private lessons?” Kara leans forward on her elbows, the paper crinkling under them, and laces her fingers together. Lena seems to try and restrain a smile but cracks. It yields into a giggle, a soft sound you almost couldn’t believe could come from somebody with such a capacity for stoicism. She ducks her head and moves as if to brush hair behind her ear, fingers trembling when she finds only flyaway whisps at her temple.

  _Still got it, Danvers._

 “Uh, no. Well, maybe later. It’s about Eliza, actually. And Lillian.”

 “Funny how they ended up together here, huh?” Kara relaxes back into her chair. “Kismet, or something.”

 “Yeah, something. Listen, Kara—“

Kara thinks of her dream. She’s certain she’s meant to be here; on earth, in this house. Coping mechanism though it might be, the idea that things happen for a reason motivates her to keep going as days go on. She regards Lena, clearly trying to work up the courage to say something, and tries to see deeper into her, as if the reason for their meeting would be hidden under her pajama top.

“Good morning girls!” Lena’s shoulders go taut and whatever she was about to say gets drowned in a sip of coffee. Behind her, Eliza emerges in her customary pair of button down pajamas and slippers, arms forming an arc over her head. They engage in their easy intimacy—Eliza squeezes Kara’s shoulder as she passes by, Kara directs her to the coffee without being asked. She notices Lena’s eyes on them, but doesn’t say anything it about it.

“Lord, I slept like a rock.” Eliza takes her mug to stand by the French doors, gazing out and onto the ocean. “I must have been really worn out last night.”

There’s a spitting sound and when Kara looks to Lena coffee spots mar her Reince Priebus article. She sputters and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

“You okay?”

Nodding, Lena gathers the pieces of her newspaper. “That’s enough politics for this morning, I think.” When her back is turned to throw them in the garbage, Eliza gives Kara a _What was that?_ Look. Kara can only shrug.

“Is Lillian still not up?” Eliza asks, eyes flicking to her watch. “It’s nearly a quarter-10.”

“She must have been worn out last night, too.”

Kara physically startles when Eliza dribbles coffee down the front of her pajamas, yelping. Lena isn’t paying attention at all, having taken a sudden interest in her two-tone mug. She’s further confused to find her mother fire engine red as she dabs at the stain with a paper towel.

Like a shroud being removed, Kara thinks she’s beginning to see some of the strangeness that Lena had mentioned last night.

Lillian doesn’t rise until 10:15, and by then they’ve sorted their plan for the day and have begun to put it into action. Lena, Kara learns, is non-operational before her third cup of coffee and likes her toast with a lot of butter. She eats her eggs scrambled, with hot sauce, and taps her mouth with the tip of her utensil when she’s listening to somebody talk. Kara finds these things have been teased out of their mundanity by the person doing them, and is unusually interested by her pressing the prongs of their fork just-so past the crease of their mouth and back again.

“You grew up here, right Lena?”

“We spent most of our summers here.” Lena nods, moving her last scraps of food around her plate.

“Maybe you could show Kara around. I saw some bikes in the garage—you could take them into town together.”

Kara could just about pick Eliza up in her arms and spin her around. Her mother has always been a pretty good wingman, beginning in 10th grade when she would drive Kara and Gert Stevens to the movies without asking any questions. She already knows what outfit she’s going to put on—drawstring shorts, t-shirt, her beat up boat shoes, a button down open over it all.

“That would be awesome.” She says, still half in a fantasy of Lena’s backside on the handlebars of her bike as she pedals down the avenue. “Lena?”

“Sure.” Lena has an unreadable expression on her face, part pleasure and part something else that Kara can’t identify. Her eyes are fixed on Kara. They don’t waver until 10:15 comes and the door behind them opens, revealing Lillian already dressed for the day and picking lint off her shoulder.

“What are you all doing not dressed?” She says and tsks, and tsks again when she sees all the coffee is gone. Kara watches Lena’s expression harden until she’s not looking at her at all, but staring at her hands, and sees Eliza roll her eyes.

“Coffee’s in the top cupboard, grumpy.”

Lena’s back tenses as if bracing for an explosion, signalling Kara to look to Lillian for a reaction. Instead of the anger that Lena’s posture telegraphs, Lillian flashes a neutral smile over her shoulder. “Thank you." 

To Kara, this seems like a totally normal human interaction. Eliza doesn’t seem to think anything of it either, nor does Lillian as she dumps heaps of coffee into the pot and grouses about the eggs being cold. Lena, however, looks like she’s just been picked up and dropped into an alternate universe.

“We should head into town.” She says. “Before it gets too late.”

Downstairs, Kara puts on exactly the outfit she’d thought of at the breakfast table. She spends time and preening—looking at how the t-shirt accents the lines of her body, throwing her hair up in a bun, down again, and then back into a bun.

Lena is already in the garage when she gets there. The door to the driveway is open, letting light in to illuminate the space. It’s large and has many stratum of junk sedimented on top of each other, and the smell of gasoline over the must of disuse. It’s disarmingly normal.

“There’s another bike in here somewhere.” Outfitted in a sundress and Keds, Lena is fighting her way through what looks like a lawnmower covered in garden hoses to get at a set of handlebars poking out. She has a smudge of black dirt on her forearm. Behind her, one of the bikes is propped up against a row of shelves. “That one needs air in the tires.”

She makes a pretty picture, dolled in a low-key sort of way and fighting gruffly through dirty equipment. Kara thinks of Siobhan and how she used to look after a long bike ride, feeling the familiar pang of loss in her chest. “I’ve got it.”

Lena hefts the bike out only to find it completely without tires. After a few moments of confusion she explains sheepishly that she and Lex removed them to make a go-cart one summer, much to Kara’s delight.

“That, I gotta see.” She’s crouched over the bike pump, filling each tire with quick presses of the handle. Lena pinks up like a ripening peach.

“It’s a piece of junk.”

“I’m sure it’s not.” Kara stands, wipes her hands on her knees, kicks one of the tires and nods. If the stars on the ceiling are any indication, Lena has never created anything in her life that would count as a piece of junk. “In any case, you can ride on the handlebars.” _Think it into existence and it will happen._

“Are you kidding me? I’m way too heavy.”

“Try me.”

That’s how Kara ends up pedaling up the sandy street and only faltering to admire the swathe of skin exposed by the scoop of Lena’s neckline. Lena has her knees pressed together and a piece of her dress tucked between them, keeping it from flipping up in the breeze.

“Yoga really makes you strong, huh?”

“Mm-hm.” On the handlebars, Kara’s hands are framing and just barely not touching Lena’s thighs. It’s a maddening distance. “You’re light as a feather.”

Although she could pedal them as quick as they please, she keeps at a deliberate pace. It’s heating up but there’s a gentle, brackish wind that tempers the bite and threatens to foil Lena’s skirt. So quiet is it out that Kara wonders if there’s anybody else at all in the neighborhood.

“Is it usually this calm?" 

“Still pretty early in the season, I guess.” Lena tips her head back, exposing her face fully to the sun. For the last time that afternoon, the thought of what she was trying to say at breakfast zips through the back of Kara’s mind. It seems unimportant now. “I haven’t been out here in a couple years, so I don’t know.”

“A couple years, really?" 

“We were going through some hard times. Still are.”

The town amounts to a single strip of road dotted by your usual mix of eclectic antique stores, upscale boutiques and places for candy and souvenirs. Lena is so comically excited to see her favorite saltwater taffy place still standing that they nearly ditch the bike right there and go inside. They manage to make it to the first available bike rack and lock it up there.

 _It’s not a date_ Kara repeats to herself, even as she watches Lena dismount her handlebars and straighten her hemline. On her first date with Siobhan, she’d let Kara take her out to dinner with an air of being above it all—the restaurant, the beater Kara’d picked her up in. At that point in time it had been freshly bought, and Kara was proud of it, had saved every penny she earned working to buy it.

But she was right. It was a sucky car. The bike was probably better, quality-wise. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because it’s not a date. They’re just two girls walking to get saltwater taffy together, laughing together, listening to the other’s descriptions of the places she used to go growing up.

When Kara first came to earth, most of her education about how to form relationships with other people came from movies. Alex would watch them with her, ostensibly in the interest of her assimilation, but Kara figured out that she liked them, too. _Twilight, Sugar and Spice, Mean Girls,_ all the Nicholas Sparks movies—Alex had warned her that life would never be exactly like that, at best maybe a copy of that faxed until unrecognizable.

But here is Lena in front of her, clear as a bell. In the taffy shop, picking out a few of each flavor, and in the tacky gift shop trying to convince her to buy a shark tooth necklace. They don’t talk about much of consequence, but they don’t need to. The pleasantness of the day fills in every gap like warm sand. Easy and natural, just like _Bring it On_ and _Clueless_ had said it would be, just like it never was when she was a teenager.

Kara has a familiar sense of self satisfaction for her successful replication of the human ritual. Every connection they make, every flash of teeth and laugh and story told. She dares herself to eat 5 hotdogs just so Lena will try to talk her out of it, then watch behind covered eyes as she does. The conversation that morning, Lena’s arrival the previous night, and even their first meeting in the yoga studio seem like they happened a thousand years ago.

At the end of their day, Lena plants herself on Kara’s handlebars without being asked and Kara eases on the pedals with the same carefulness as her French press. As if she could actually feel Lena’s weight. She wishes that she could. It’s nearing six and the sun is sodden in the sky.

“Ready to go home, m’lady?” Lena doesn’t say anything, just stretches her feet in front of her and flexes in her Keds. Kara squeezes her hands on the handlebars, flexing each finger individually, imagining them touching more fully the fabric of Lena’s dress.

“I wish we could stay out longer.” Lena responds faintly. Kara smiles.

“How about after dinner, we could like...hang?”

The other woman says nothing to that. Their ride is quicker and quieter than their first. By the time they alight in front of the beach house it’s well and truly chilly. Kara coasts by the entrance once and softly turns the bike around, making a circle.

“What are you doing?”

“Staying out a little longer!” Kara chirps, standing on the pedals so that her face is level with the back of Lena’s neck. The memory of the dream she’d had and the smell of the flowers comes rushing back to her all at once. She tells herself not to inhale like a creep, but does anyway, as discreetly as she can.

“Are you smelling me?” Lena asks, sounding both incredulous and a little delighted. Kara almost tips them right over.

“I, uh—“

“Girls!” Eliza’s voice echoes across the quiet street. She’s appeared in the upper front deck, blanket wrapped around her shoulders and half-illuminated by a porch light. “What’re you doing?”

“Donuts.” Kara calls back. Her cheek scrapes against Lena’s neck when she angles her head and skids to a stop, heels against tar. “When’s dinner?”

“Lillian wants to go now, so come inside.”

Bike deposited on the front lawn, Kara starts to bound her way up the deck stairs and is stopped by Lena’s soft voice. She turns, sees her backlit by the sun, lifts her eyebrows. “What’s up?”

“That thing I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Inside?” Kara gestures with her head. Lena rubs a hand up her opposite arm and back down again.

“I think it’s gotta be now.”

“O-Kay.” The day had gone so well, and Kara puzzles at the sudden pivot of it. The inwardness of Lena’s posture is strange. “What’s the emergency?”

There’s two seconds before Lena opens her mouth to say what she’s heard that things still seem normal. Kara thinks it might be about her brother, or about something Lillian has said to her, but it’s not. Of course it’s not. Kara is an alien from an advanced civilization crashed to earth, and she’s not sure why she expects things to be easy anymore.

—-

“You girls sure are quiet tonight.” Kara has known Eliza for enough years to know when she’s trying to pretend to be uninterested in something she’s actually very, very interested in. Her eyes are on the menu in front of her, but you could almost see her ears perking up like a dog’s. The restaurant around them is quiet, dim, and expensive looking, and Kara’s hand reaches down to tug at the hem of her shorts.

“If I’d known we were coming here, I’dve worn different clothes. I probably look like the guy who catches the fish.” She jokes. The oppressive silence that had descended on them since the car ride over continues. Next to her, Lena looks up from her menu, squirrlish.

“You look fine, Kara.”

“Well, pants would have been nice.” Lillian snips from behind her menu, and the table trembles from the reverberation of whatever Eliza’s done to her under the it. Normally, Kara might find it a little funny. In light of the last half-hour, it makes her go green. A quick glance over at Lena confirms that she’s in the same boat.

All of Eliza’s secrecy over the past year, the books, the closing out of browser windows really fast whenever Kara and Alex entered the room, Kara had just assumed she was going through a midlife crisis after Jeremiah’s death. Was she really just looking for rich older women the whole time? Was Lillian a sugar momma? Her eyes flit between the two of them, each pretending to be engrossed in their menus, and narrow with suspicion. Was this really the first time that they were meeting? It seems impossible now that that could be true.

On the table next to her salad plate, her phone lights up with a text from Lena. She quickly snatches it up to inspect the message away from prying eyes.

_I don’t think I’m going to survive this dinner._

It’s not even about the gay thing, really. She’s a lesbian, and Alex is a lesbian, and Alex’s wife is a lesbian, and Alex’s step daughter is still pretty young to be thinking about that kind of thing but she’s being raised by two lesbian moms and that must count for something. So it makes sense, in a way, that Eliza would be some flavor of gay too—after all, somebody had to put all of that energy into Alex’s gene pool, and it probably wasn’t Jeremiah. Anyway, Eliza couldn’t be a lesbian could she, because she’d been married for years and years.

 _Late in life lesbians exist_ Kara derides herself _don’t be a dingus, Danvers._

“Kara?” Kara’s chin snaps up at the sound of Eliza’s voice. “You’re staring. Do I have something on me?”

“Oh. Uh.” She glances to Lena, who’s covering her entire face with her hands. “Tartar sauce?”

“We haven’t started eating yet…”

“Lena,” Lillian’s flinty eyes zero in on her daughter. “I don’t know why you’re even looking at the menu, you’ve gotten the same thing here since you were little.”

“Maybe she wants something different.” Kara blurts, mouth completely disconnected from her brain. The whole table is looking at her then, Lena to her left and Eliza to her right, and Lillian between Lena and Eliza. Their mothers have their brows furrowed, and Lillian’s mouth is slightly ajar, but Lena’s gaze is so soft Kara could sleep in it.

“Yeah, maybe I want something different.” Lillian opens her mouth as if to respond, only to be interrupted by a chipper waitress coming to their table with her notebook poised.

“Hi, guys, how are we doing tonight? My name’s Carole, can I get you started off with any—“

“We need to go to the bathroom.” Again, everybody is looking at Kara, including Carole. Her mouth is dry, but she grabs Lena by the upper arm and scurries in the direction of the women’s room. “Be right back!”

It’s blessedly empty when they enter. Lena stoops at the sink to splash her face, coming up and regarding Kara behind her in the mirror. “This is a nightmare.”

“I know. All I can think about is them doing...stuff.”

“Ugh, God, so much stuff.” Turning, Lena braces her hands behind her on the rim of the sink and shakes her head. The bathroom is small and nautically inclined, like most spaces in Cape Cod. “And all I really want is the lobster mac n cheese, but Lillian is never going to let me live it down if I get it.”

“I’ll get it.” Kara responds easily. “If you get the fish and chips, and we’ll trade bites when they’re not looking.” Eating out could be a tough endeavor when your metabolic need was twice that of a human’s, but Eliza had snuck her a turkey sandwich before they came out, so with the addition of dessert Kara is sure she can survive this dinner.

Lena reaches out and takes Kara’s hand in her own. Her eyes have a shimmering quality to them. “You’re a good friend.”

“So are you. I had a really good time this afternoon.”

“Yeah.” Lena takes a step closer so that their arms are no longer stretched out in between them. “I’m sorry I had to ruin it.”

“Not your fault. But I mean, are you sure—“

“I’m positive. Trust me.”

“Do we tell them?”

“I don’t know.” Lena glances at the door. “I don’t know how to act, but if they know we know it might make it worse.”

“Right. So we just—“

“Act normal.”

When the return to sit at the table, Kara lifts her legs too suddenly and knocks her entire glass of water onto her lap, leading to some frantic napkin pressing by Carole. Her phone lights up again, this time with a text from Eliza. 

_Did you guys do drugs before you came to dinner?_

Throughout the dinner, Kara’s attention waffles between her food and Lena and Lillian’s interactions. Lillian seems to be making an attempt at catching up with Lena—she asks her about her classes, how she’s enjoying her food, but can’t make a comment without following it up with a criticism or a qualification. Kara also realizes that she’s not the only person who is noticing this. Eliza flinches at every barb, and when they leave she pulls Lillian aside while Kara and Lena wait together in the car.

“It sucks that she talks to you like that.” Kara cranes her head to see where Eliza and Lillian are talking, Eliza assuming a posture that Kara has never seen before, at once gentle and stern, and Lillian looking away.

“I don’t think she means it.” Is all Lena says in response.

—-

The game room of the beach house is an impressive display of carefully curated informality. Most of the space is used to accommodate a compact sectional, the kind that reclines and has an ottoman that a person could curl up and sleep on, then a TV stand packed with games, game stations, and a flat screen television. When she’d first seen it, Kara had thought that Lillian might have a soft spot that hadn’t been apparent to her at first blush. Now she knows it’s probably the deft hand of an interior designer, one who would know what young children like to keep themselves occupied with.

She crouches in front of the TV console and fiddles with the Gamecube, smiling when she sees copies of Mario Kart and Animal Crossing tucked next to it. The plastic around the cases is wrinkled and ripped from use. For a moment she imagines Lena younger sitting on her knees on the couch, tongue between her teeth, trying to beat her faceless brother at Rainbow Road. Kara only knows enough about her family to know that whatever trouble had passed over them concerned Lex mainly, evident both in her conversations with Lena and the lack of photographs of him in the house.

“Hey.” She turns to look over her shoulder when she hears Lena coming down the stairs behind her, finding her with a pint of whiskey in her hand. “I thought I’d bring us some reinforcements.”

“Great.” Kara shuffles back onto the couch, bringing her feet up and tucking them underneath her. Lena arranges herself next to her, cracking the lid off the pint and taking a long draw. Kara’s eyebrows lift to her hairline and she tucks that information away with all the rest, the eggs and the coffee and everything else. “Oh, so we’re getting right into it.”

“I mean.” Lena shrugs, the whiskey grimace lingering on her face, and gestures around with her hands as if to say: _why, after all of this, wouldn’t we get right into it?_ Kara understands immediately. “You know?”

“Yeah, I got it.” Kara takes her pull from the bottle, performative as it may be. It’s another human ritual that brings her great peace to participate in, the trading of drinks, the press of her mouth where Lena’s had been just a moment before. The alcohol on her lips tingling when she pulls away and the brief sense of fogginess before her biology sweeps it away into glucose and ATP and fat. “When do I start feeling less weird about our moms boning?" 

Barking out a laugh, Lena slides down on the couch. “Please don’t refer to my mother as _boning_ anything ever again.”

“Hey, it’s gross for me too! I didn’t even know Eliza was--”

“Neither did I.” Lena says. Her voice holds less levity than before. She crosses her arms over her chest. “It’s just so fucked up, like--we’ve been working on our relationship for years, and I really thought--well, whatever. I was wrong.”

Kara could pull away, or choose not to probe that wound, but curiosity rises in her like a tide. “Working on it, because of Lex.”

“Yeah. She got her sudden interest in family therapy after he went to prison. She was just married to my dad for so long, you know, and I know that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but--”

“No, I’ve been thinking the same thing.” Kara admits, part of her relieved that Lena had vocalized it first. Eliza and Jeremiah had always had a loving if functional relationship, both brilliant and empathetic. She remembers them more separately than she does together, each taking on a seperate burden of her upbringing and assimilation to society, but they liked going on hikes and taking her and Alex to the Saturday farmer’s market. On Krypton, marriages had been fundamentally sexless and functioned more as partnerships to improve a family’s standing or pass on lineage, so it made sense to her that her earth parents would function more as friends than lovers. “My foster dad died a year ago and everything has been kind of topsy-turvy since then--hey, stop laughing!”

“Sorry, I’ve just never heard somebody say topsy-turvy in a sentence.”

“Well.” Kara huffs. “It is. She’s been acting weird, and Alex has been taking it hard.”

“And what about you?” Lena is gazing at her. Kara doesn’t think she’s seen another person look so wide-open, like a lake, the ocean, some kind of vast plain under a blue sky. Those are the kinds of places where a person might feel like they could really plumb down to the truth of things. Kara is unmoored by it, there’s a flippant comment on the tip of her tongue that gets lost.

“I’ve been sad, mostly. My real parents died, too, and then him. And my girlfriend broke up with me and I think I’m still in love with her, even though she was horrible.”

“What was her name?”

“Siobhan.”

“That’s a horrible name.”

Despite her verbal diarrhea, Lena doesn’t look judgemental. Just sad, resigned almost. Kara has the feeling that she’s said the right thing and the wrong thing all at the same time. “I had a dream about you last night.”

“What was I doing?”

“Coming to my apartment.” Kara shifts closer and sets the bottle down at her feet, until they’re sitting side by side, feet on the floor, legs straight. “You had flowers. They had this smell--I didn’t know what it was, but then I realized that it was you. They smelled like you.” Turning, Kara cups Lena’s cheek in her hand, turns her profile toward her own. Lena comes willingly and Kara, against her better judgement, can hear her heart skipping against the confines of her ribcage. _Cheater_ she chides, even as she presses her face close to the side of her neck. There’s the familiar scent, there’s Lena’s form sighing against her. There’s the bodily tremble that Kara cannot discern the source of. “Can I kiss you?” 

“I think it can only happen one time.” Lena whispers. Kara’s nose is under her her ear, then her lips. “I’d like you to, but I don’t know if it’s a good idea for it to happen again. I think we should try and stay friends.”

There are deals that a person makes in the face of great uncertainty of the outcome. Orpheus floated down the river toward Hades, Faust met Mephistopheles at the crossroads, Kara kisses Lena and promises herself it will be the last time. Even as Lena catches her lower lip between her own and pulls, and reaches to tangle her hands in her hair and gathers Kara all the way against her. It’s only one kiss, and their mouths don’t even move all that much.

To Kara, that is a promise kept.

“There.” Lena says when they break apart, faces lingering near each other’s. “There, that’s enough.”

“That’s enough.” Kara parrots. There’s something wet on her sock that she realizes is the whiskey upturned. The liquid gradually soaks the bottom of her foot, room-temperature and sticky, but she stays tacked to Lena all the time, folded into her, the smell of flowers fresh in her nose. When they go to bed that night, it’s to the same room and the same bunks. Kara considers asking Lena to come sleep in her for a moment, but kicks the thought out as soon as it arises. It won’t do them any good.

“I’m glad.” Lena says once they’re both settled in their respective beds, lights out. “That we got that out of our systems.”

“Yeah.”

“If we kept doing it, it would just make this whole thing more complicated.”

“Yeah.”

There’s a beat of almost-silence, punctuated by the roar of the ocean.

“Good night, Kara.”

“Night, Lena.”


	4. can you stay up to see the dawn?

“So let me get this straight.” Lena crams a spoonful of oatmeal into her mouth. “Yoga McHottie _kisses_ you after an enviable beach date and you swerve her? Lena Margaret Luthor, you are the biggest assmonke-“

“Jess.” Lena can’t do this right now. Jess is a gnat in her ear but her attention is focused singularly out of the French doors and onto the back deck where her bunkmate is twisting her body into a pretzel. Freshman year of college she’d taken an anatomy class where she’d learned about all the different muscles in the human body, but she’d never seen them on a real person. When Kara lowers herself into a plank, there they are. Biceps, deltoids, triceps, some of the back ones. Lena sucks her spoon into her mouth and runs her tongue along it. “What were you doing when I told you about our moms fucking?”

“Watching _The Bachelor_.” Jess responds. “Wait, your moms are really doing it? I thought that was a joke.”

“Why in the name of Jesus Christ himself would I joke about that?”

“You have a dark sense of humor.” Lena hears water running followed by gurgling and winces. Jess always wants to talk to her during her morning apple cider vinegar rinse. “Anyway, that's not like...so bad. If you like her a lot.”

“She has an ex-girlfriend who she’s still in love with.” Kara catches her eye in the back patio and smiles wide, waving. Lena raises her coffee cup in salute, almost splashing some of it back onto herself. “How can I compete with that? I’m not even sure I want to.”

“Confidence, girl. Do I need to give you another one of my famous pep talks?”

“Pass, thanks. I gotta go, she’s headed this way.” Kara is standing, rolling her shoulders and gathering up her mat. Lena hits the end call button in the middle of Jess pleading with her to _send pics!_ And plasters her best disaffected smile on her face.

Kara opens the doors and promptly trips over the threshold, nearly dropping her things into the dining room in the process. This is the thing that fascinates Lena the most: Kara’s perfectly controlled movements when she exercises, the strain of her muscles under her own weight, and her inability to keep her body in check in everyday life. It’s a blessing, probably, that she didn’t end up on the top bunk.

“Whoops!” She laughs as she traipses her way into the kitchen, tossing her mat to the couch in the living room. It passes an impressive distance. Lena’s eyebrows raise. “Morning. How’s the coffee?”

“Strong.”

“Perfect.” They slide through a few minutes of near-silence. The doors are left open and welcome in the morning song of birds and the ocean, a few people talking on the opposite street. Lena’s back is turned to Kara but she’s absently tuned to the sound of her fixing her coffee to her liking and the soft hum of pleasure she makes when she succeeds. It’s almost like last night’s kiss didn’t even happen and they’re just plodding along on a totally platonic path to friendship. Almost, except that Lena hasn’t stopped thinking about it. Or feeling it in her bones. “So I’ve been thinking. And I think we need to tell them we know.”

Lena keeps her back turned to Kara and runs her finger along the rim of her coffee cup. Her words are sudden but have the cadence of somebody who’s been thinking about what to say for a long time. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

“They’re our moms. And we’re all grown-ups. Listen,” With a quick movement Kara pulls a chair next to Lena at the kitchen table, sitting close. Lena glances at her askance, moving her hair over one shoulder with a pass of her hand. Kara seems caught with the movement but snaps back to attention in the same moment. “My sister’s been blowing up my phone. She knows something is up and she wants to come down.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“I think we all deserve to know what the heck is going on.”

She’s right, of course. Lena can’t tell if she’s brave or brazen, or some combination of the two. With sprinkle of optimism on top, perhaps. One of Kara’s hands glides across the table to cover Lena’s wrist. Over the bitter smell of coffee, Lena catches the peppermint of the Badger Balm she’s seen Kara rub into skin. It explains how smooth her palms are, devoid of the calluses that weight lifters are prone to on the ridges under their digits.

At least, she assumes that Kara lifts weights, even if she’s only ever seen her do yoga. “So what do you want to do?”

“Sit them down tonight and lay our cards on the table.”

“That makes me…” Lena pauses to search for the appropriate words. “...extremely nervous.”

“Me too.” Kara’s hand on her wrist squeezes and Lena feels it in at least 10 other places on her body. “We can be nervous together. We can do it all together.”

If she had a time machine, Lena might go back to last night on the couch and amend her “just once” to “just twice”, or even three times, just to give herself a spare. There needed to be limits, yes, but did they have to be so draconian? She can’t even look at Kara in the face, troubled by her ebbing will, and so stares down into the brown-black of her coffee.

It’s an easy distraction, anyway. A minor crisis to pull her attention from the major one. She hasn’t so much as spoken to her mother alone since the first night she arrived, and has no real gauge for how to approach the situation. “Okay.” She says, right as the door to Eliza’s bedroom opens.

Both Eliza and Lillian step out. Together. And fully dressed, blessedly, but Lillian still has the right side of her head rumpled from sleep. Lena has never seen her mother rumpled from anything, not when her father died, not when Lex was sentenced. But she’s stepping out of Eliza’s bedroom and she’s not even wearing makeup.

If it’s not a full admission of guilt, it’s the beginnings of one. Lena pulls her wrist from Kara’s grasp. “Good morning, girls.” Eliza says, half a smile barely held in place. She shuffles toward the kitchen. “How’d everybody sleep?”

“Fine.” Kara responds faintly. Lena says nothing. Lillian is lingering in the doorway of the bedroom, half shut behind her and obscuring whatever lies therein.

“Well, that’s great.” This is followed by a minute of agonizing silence in which the only sound is Eliza sipping her coffee. “Hey, Kara, why don’t we go for a walk today? And then we’ll all have dinner at the house.”

“Sure, mom.” Kara’s arms are folded on the table. She’s staring into the goblet they make.

“Great.” Eliza says. “That’s great.”

—-

 _Are they separating us on purpose?_ Lena receives the text moments after Kara steps out the door. She glances at her phone, then the newly emptied threshold, then to her mother who is—in the kitchen and making a cake. For some reason. _Like, divide and conquer?_ The next one reads, buzzing in a few minutes after the first. Lena is preoccupied with other things.

Has she ever seen Lillian make anything, ever? She racks her brain. As a child, she’d not only had two nannies, but the house had been fully staffed with cooks and cleaning people. When Lena had shown an interest in cooking as a young girl, Lillian hired her a private tutor. It never stuck.

“What are you making, mom?” Lillian is a blur, pulling flour and sugar and eggs from various crannies. She doesn’t look to see where she’s reaching. Her hair is up in a bun and the sleeves of her sensible blouse are up around her elbows.

“Lemon cake.”

Lena had tried to go downstairs while Kara and Eliza got ready to go. She had emails to respond to and potential advisors to suss out. But her mother stopped her, and she asked her to keep her company while she baked. So Lena stays sat at the kitchen table, nervous and bored, twiddling her thumbs. As she observes Lillian moving, she notices something. “Where’s your recipe?”

“In my head.” Lillian fetches her reading glasses from the pocket of her blouse and slips them onto her face, examining the measuring cups to find the one she needs. This is such a perplexing answer that Lena finds it nearly impossible to digest, and considers that maybe she’s taken in so much new information about her mother in the last 3 days that her brain is shutting down.

“Care to elaborate?”

“Don’t be snide, Lena.”

“I’m not being—you know what, whatever. I’ll just shut up.”

Pausing her movement, Lillian tilts her head up, eyes closed, then braces herself on the counter with both arms. Lena tries to discern if it’s anger or disappointment, the only two emotions she’s ever been able to recognize in her mother. This seems altogether different. The lines in her face look deeper without her hair there to obscure them. “This is the only thing my mother would make. This and meatloaf. That was the end of her compliment of skills.” She opens her eyes again and stares straight ahead, has the ghost of a smile on her mouth. “And the meatloaf wasn’t even very good.”

“Is that why you never taught me how to cook?”

“I can make a few things.” Lillian measures out a cup of flower, levels it over the bag with a knife, and dumps it into the mixing bowl. “If you wanted to learn, I wanted you to learn from the best. It’s a such a shame you didn’t keep up with it.”

The offhand remark is so pedestrian to Lena now that she almost doesn’t recognize it at first. They’ve become white noise. But Lillian’s knife pauses over her second cup of flower as she says it, set up to be leveled, and she blinks. “I’m sorry, that wasn’t--” She finishes skimming the flour from the top, dumps the second cup in, and wipes at her forehead with her forearm. “Of course you can do whatever you want. I didn’t mean to make it sound like I’m disappointed in you for not learning how to cook.”

Clear, direct, understandable. Lena nearly falls sideways off her chair. Lillian isn’t looking at her, of course, but measuring out baking powder and salt to go in with the dry ingredients. “Yeah, I know.” And then, because she’s in the mood to push things, because the last few days have been so strange she feels like she _can,_ she adds. “I wish you’d taught me to make that cake.”

“I haven’t done it in years.” Lillian pauses, thinking. “Not since Alexander was born, I think.”

“So why now?”

“Oh, nostalgia, maybe.” Whisked, the dry ingredients get set to the side and Lillian gets to work cracking eggs. Each makes a delicate sound. Lena notices the way her mother makes a clean break four times over. A practiced flick of her wrist, focused eyes. “Eliza wants to try it.”

“You and Eliza are pretty close, huh?” Lena pretends to be interested in a hangnail. “That you’re telling her all of this, before you’re telling me.” She can’t help the surge of petty hurt in her stomach. It’s so childish, and she’s much too old to be wounded by her mother. And over something as inconsequential as a cake. “Maybe I wanted to try it, before.”

“I don't want to fight.”  Lillian sounds defeated already, which doesn’t sit well with Lena. She can usually go a few rounds before she reaches this stage of exhaustion. They haven’t even begun to dig into each other like they do. She snaps the arms onto the hand mixer with force. “I’m trying to share something with you.”

“I’m 23. I’m in grad school. Why are you trying to make a cake with me like I’m a kid?”

“For Christ’s sake, Lena, because it’s nice. It’s a nice thing to make a cake. People love cake.” Lillian slams the mixer down on the counter with enough force that Lena startles in her chair. She wipes her forehead again with her forearm, leaving a smear of flower, and pats her temple. “Jesus God, you’d think you were at that Irish orphanage for your whole life, not a few months. So dour.”

“I’m allowed to be mad at you.” Lena argues, though her conviction is waning. She’d had that brief flashbomb of anger but it’d shrunken in the intensity of Lillian’s rebuttal. The ratcheting up of their encounter is more about what she’s used to than what she actually wants. She’s trying to follow a script that Lillian seems interested in throwing out. The other woman is vibrating as she tries to continue combining the wet ingredients.

“I’m mad, too.” Her hand splatters the cup of buttermilk over the granite countertop and she swears under her breath, reaching for a paper towel to wipe it all up.

“You were never around, you never hugged me--” The second cup spills as well. This time Lillian swears over her breath, a harsh _fuck_ that reminds Lena too much of how she sounds when an equation she’s working on just isn’t coming out in her favor.

“So what? So what?" Every muscle in Lena’s body tenses and releases at once. Lillian’s voice isn’t a yell but it’s clear and firm, no crawl space and no wriggle room, and louder than she’d expected.  "If my mother’d hugged me I’d still be living in shit. I was doing you a favor.” Lena is rattled out of any potential response and in the ensuing silence her mother successfully measures out her buttermilk, adds it to the mixture, and beats it smooth with the hand blender. When it stops it leaves the room silent in actuality. Lena observes Lillian, observes her posture as she slouches over the bowl. She looks small, even when she finally turns her head to regard Lena straight on. “You think it was easy for me? It wasn’t. But I thought I was doing my best for you.”

“Do you still think that?”

“Of course I don’t.” Lillian shakes her head, her voice cracking. “My son is gone. You can barely stand to spend time with me. Can’t I have learned my lesson? I just want to finish this stupid cake.”

“Do you need help?” Lena asks in a small voice, in lieu of an answer that she knows she can’t give. There’s pounding in her head that she recognizes as a premature emotional hangover. Lillian shrugs, nods. Then she asks for her to grease two round pans with butter and flower. In a relationship of peaks and valleys this moment is something in the in-between. Placid on the surface, but vibrating with potential energy. Lena runs the end of a stick of butter over the bottom and edges of the pan, sprinkles flower on it, taps the excess out over the sink. Lillian watches her all the while.

“I want to do better by you.” She says finally, while batter from the mixer drips into the bowl. “And I am trying.”

“But you’re still keeping things from me.” Lena comes up to the line and smudges it with her foot. Her mother looks like a different person, parts of her crumbled, and Lena notices that she’s still not wearing make up.

“Lena.” She says, her voice even but wafer-thin. Lena tries to find a place for this iteration of her name in the world, it’s not angry and it’s not sad but it reminds her of the way Lillian would sometimes talk to her as a small girl. “You know that me and Eliza are close.”

“Yeah.” Lena's heart is hammering. She acknowledges that she didn't really expect her mother to actually give in, and maybe isn't prepared for her to do it. She keeps her hands steady on the pan and tries to focus on the metal growing warmer in her grip.

“Well, we’ve been—“ Lillian pauses to bite the pad of her thumb and press the heel of her hand to her forehead. She passes something that might be a laugh, and then looks at Lena with disbelief and pride naked on her face. Like when Lena won her first chess tournament in the fifth grade.  “Shit. You know, don’t you?”

So there it is. Lillian's cards are on the table. Lena puts hers there too. “I—yeah. I guessed." 

“I should have known. You’re too smart.” She shakes her head, hand still on her forehead. “I don’t know what to tell you. She’s wonderful.”

It’s so big and so weird that Lena is swallowed whole by it. What is she supposed to say to that, exactly? There are a million questions, and her palms are sweating against the cake pan, she can’t look at Lillian. She’s always been able to look at her mother, during screaming matches and criticisms and what felt like white hot hatred. But she can’t do it now, when she’s is telling her that she’s in love. She knows somehow that now is not the right time for her to say any of the things that are flying through her mind--this is Lillian’s space, so she lets her guide the conversation. “I don't know what to say.”

“That's alright.”

“And Kara—“

“Eliza wants to tell you both together. She wants you to be able to ask questions.” As she says it, Lillian is smiling. She’s finishing her lemon cake and preparing to put it in the oven. Lena can only observe from the sidelines. “I know you two are--close. But please don't tell her. At least wait until tomorrow night.”

Easier said than done. Kara has blown up her phone with text messages; mostly emojis, and some English words. There’s an ‘i miss you’ folded in the middle that should be overwhelming considering they’ve been apart for two hours, but only makes Lena want to crush her phone against her heart.

Lillian teaches her how to make whipped icing using measurements she’s apparently been storing in her head all this time. She asks Lena, once, hesitantly, if she has any questions she wants to ask. Lena decides for the both of them that they can talk about it later. She sees how some of the tension has fallen out of Lillian's posture and selfishly, for a moment, wants to soak in a pleasant moment that's just about them. No arguments, no snide remarks, no Eliza or Kara. For the rest of the day, they can enter in a mutual, unspoken agreement that for now, other things don't exist.

“Really nicely done.” She says when Lena is finished with the frosting. She swipes some out with the tip of her index finger and tastes with a nod. “Just like Marlene’s.”

“It’s frosting.”

“She had a particular way with it.”

When Kara and Eliza come in the front door, Lena and Lillian are on the couch watching _The Real Housewives of New York,_ which Lillian is alternately bemused and confused by. “How do these women know each other again?” She leans over to ask Lena. “Are they business associates?”

“Hey, you two.” Eliza trots in the front door with bags on each arm, followed by a hangdog-looking Kara. She brightens up when she sees Lena. “We got stuff for dinner.”

“Hi.” Lillian and Lena say in unison, each focused on a different Danvers. Lillian moves to the kitchen where Eliza is unloading groceries and talking about how she thought she’d make salmon for dinner that night, and Lillian is showing her the cake they’d made and Eliza is cooing about it.

“Me and Kara are going to go downstairs for a second.” Lena says, but she’s scarcely heard. Kara gives her a look that says _we are?_ But follows Lena down the steps and into the game room all the same. The second their socked feet land in the floor, Lena has pulled Kara into a tight hug, face buried into the side of her neck. She does it before she can think twice about the brazen comfort-seeking of it, and Kara has reciprocated in kind before she can pull away in embarrassment.

Kara hugs her so tightly that it lifts her a little off the floor, leaving her on her tiptoes. One of her arms is wrapped around Lena’s waist, the other is buried in her hair. Her reaction is quick. Kara is ready and enthusiastic in the intimacy she gives. “Not that I’m complaining.” She says, catching some of Lena’s hair in her mouth. “But, uh, what’s up?”

“Nothing.” Lena murmurs, eyes shut tightly. “Just wanted to hug you.”

Kara hums and for a moment that’s all it is, then her body stiffens. “Wait, did something happen?” She pulls away by a degree and looks up the staircase. “Did she say something to—“

“Kara.” Lena moves one of her hands to Kara’s bicep, rubbing over it. The other woman relaxes discernibly, eyes running over Lena’s face. “It’s fine. Nothing really happened. I’m just glad to see you.” Both of Kara’s arms remain wrapped around Lena’s waist, half-enveloping her, and it occurs to her that this isn’t the most platonic position to be standing in.

“Gosh, I’m so happy to see you.” She breathes. Lena squirms. “It was so weird with Eliza today. It was like, all she could talk about was your mom.”

“I don’t think we should talk to them tonight.” Lena blurts. Kara’s brow furrows. “Can’t we just wait one more day?” And maybe she’s playing an unfair song, but Lena runs that hand over Kara’s bicep a few more times. Kara’s eyes move to it and her lips part, allowing her to suck in a few deeper breaths. “Before we face the music?”

“Okay, yeah. Sure. Whatever you want.” Kara’s eyes flick between her eyes and mouth as she says it, and Lena swallows hard. “We can do whatever you want.”

The night passes so pleasantly that to Lena it seems like she’s in a different house, with a different family. They eat dinner and have cake (and when Kara learns that Lena had a hand in making it, she takes a double portion) and the conversation goes easy, for once. Lillian even joins in on their discussions about science and engineering, bringing a voice to the table that Lena hasn’t heard for years.

There are things that she knows empirically about her mother: that she has her PhD from Yale, that she helped build up L-Corp with her bare hands before Lex sent it toppling to the ground. There’s passion behind the way that she talks about vaccine technology and self-driving cars at the dinner table that’s indicative of that willfulness. For 23 years Lena had tried to tell herself that she’s nothing like her adoptive mother, that no genes were passed down and so she was safe. Lillian, who has had a few glasses of wine, gestures with her hands as she talks about the possibilities for an HIV cure on the horizon. Lena begins to reconsider.

“I’m glad we waited.” Kara murmurs as she and Lena do the washing up together. “I’m actually having a pretty good time.”

“Me too.” Lena says, all honesty.

They play Monopoly. Lillian wins, _of course,_ and manages to keep her gloating to a minimum. Lena doesn’t miss the way that Eliza rubs at the fabric of Lillian’s pants with the pad of her thumb, but her stomach doesn’t flip half as much. For the first time, the idea of their conversation doesn’t give her a sense of incredible dread. Lillian looks happy, Lillian is sitting on the floor and she’s playing Monopoly. There are better ways in the universe that this could have happened, stranger ones, but worse ones as well.

—

“Maybe this isn’t as much of a bad thing as we thought.” Kara broaches tentatively later that evening. They’re laying in their respective bunks, lights out, stars aglow. Lena is drunk but not too drunk, mostly warm and loose feeling. Kara, interestingly enough, doesn’t seem to be affected by alcohol all that much. “Eliza seems really happy.”

“Lillian does too.”

“I just can’t get over that they’re...ugh.” Kara huffs out a little, distressed breath and Lena can hear her squirming in the bed. She can’t keep a smile off her face. “You know...doing it. Do you think it’s still as good, like, when you’re that age?”

It’s the alcohol, really, making her bold. Under normal circumstances she would never say anything remotely close to this. The only person she’s talked about it with before, in fact, is Jess. “I don’t know, I don’t have a lot of experience in that area. Or any.”

“Really? You’ve never—“

“No.” Lena tries to focus on a single neon star on the ceiling, the disembodied sound of Kara’s voice. In the dark, she could be anywhere. But Lena can feel her.  

“Wow. Huh.”

“Is that surprising?”

“Well, yeah! I mean, you’re…” There’s the sound of rustling, maybe Kara repositioning herself. “You’re really, y’know, sexy. And stuff.”

 _And stuff_. Whatever that means. Lena bites her lip to hold in a laugh. Sex had always come down to mechanics and biology. It wasn’t until recently that Lena realized it was also a feeling that you could have. Something that pressed on you, made you dumb and pulpy. “Sometimes it confuses me. And scares me a little.”

“I guess it is kind of scary.” Kara admits. “And confusing. Until you’re doing it.”

“And then what? You just know what to do?” Lena folds her hands on her lower stomach, resting them there. The hem of her sleep pants tickles her pinky finger. Kara chuckles and the blankets rustle again.

“Well, I’m usually pretty nervous at first. But I think it helps to start slow.”

“Like kissing.” Lena has always liked kissing. She shuts her eyes and in front of her is the woman from that night, hovering over her in the dark. Kara’s words are sparse but the gaps she leaves gives Lena’s imagination more room to sprawl out, almost more lewd than if she was talking her through every imaginary press of her lips.

“Oh yeah, lots of kissing. All over the place. It feels good and—it brings you out of your head.”

She wants to be kissed all over, she wants somebody to pull her out of her head and into someplace more hedonistic. Lena’s pinky slips between the waist of her bottoms and her hips, resting there. She wonders if Kara is thinking about that space, she wants her to be thinking about that space. It makes her body hot.

“Lena?”

“Mm? Sorry, I was thinking.”

“‘bout what?”

“Being kissed.” Being turned on is a blunt feeling. There’s very little complexity to it, it just _is._ Lena understands then what Kara was just saying about being nervous until you did it, because she’s nearly certain something inside of her has been muted in the pursuit of something else.

“Do you like, uh, being kissed?” Waves crash and cicadas chirp. Kara shifts again. Lena’s pinky extends to the top of her pubic bone, to the coarse hairs above her cunt. It’s a stupid question and it makes her smile.

“Of course.”

“Anywhere in particular?”

“Kara.” Lena chides. Kara breathes out a laugh.

“You started it.”

Slowly, Lena’s entire hand slips beneath her waistband. She avoids the white-hot generator of their conversation and moves it to rest on her thigh, gripping there. A small wet spot is forming between the fabric of her pants and the sheets. This is a bad idea for certain, but it’s like as soon as she crawls her way back into common sense she gets sucked right back into the moment. “I was with this girl and we—she sucked on my nipples, I guess. It felt amazing.”

“But you didn’t have sex?”

Lena’s hand grips her thigh and her fingernails demand half-moon indents from her skin. “I wanted to. I have this fantasy—“ Realizing where she’s about to go, Lena clamps her mouth shut and digs her fingernails harder into the meat of her thigh. Kara is breathing so hard that she can hear it.

“You have this fantasy…”

Lena rolls over, hand still in pants, and rests her forehead on her arm. Her heart is thundering out of her chest. “How did we get here again?”

“It’s not about the journey, it’s about the destination.” Kara responds earnestly. The R2D2 blankets shift and then land on the floor with a _thud._ It takes Lena a moment to realize that Kara has kicked them off her body.

“Warm?”

“I run hot.” Kara explains without missing a beat. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. We can talk about something different.”

“I think a lot about somebody seducing me. Well—maybe not seduce, but pursue. Show an interest in me, and then, when we have sex, that she—oh, I don’t know. Just that it must feel amazing to have somebody you like all the way over you, inside of you, or just—having you. It’s a stupid fantasy.”

Kara makes a sound somewhere between the back of her throat and the front of her mouth, like a whine or a textured exhale of breath. “Um.” There’s a wet seperating sound when she opens her mouth to speak. She clears her throat and her voice in the aftermath is raspy. “That’s not stupid.”

“You don’t think?”

“I think anybody would be lucky to. _Have_ you.”

Lena squeezes her eyes closed and can’t help it this time. There’s a thousand images behind them of Kara sunken inside of her, one in particular of Kara spooning her on the bunk bed with Lena’s knee up under her chin and three knuckles deep. “What’s your fantasy?”

Kara clears her throat again. “I don’t think now is the right time to talk about it.”

“Maybe we should talk about something else entirely.” Lena is surprised to find that her own voice is high and strained. She’s still fighting through a haze of fantasies in an effort to cool down. “Anything else, maybe.”

“What do you think our moms are doing right now?”

 _That’ll do it. “_ Kara, seriously?”

“I changed the subject didn’t I?” Kara laughs. Lena finds herself giggling too, facedown into the pillow with her hand now relaxed on her leg. “Can I come up there?”

“Not now, you can’t.”

“Wait, could I have before?” Lena opens her eyes and sees Kara angled out from her bunk to look up at her. “I take it all back.”

“Too late.”

“At least let me come comfort you.”

“Goodnight, Kara.”

___

 

Kara wakes up at 2 AM in the morning with her phone flashing in her face. She’s missed six calls from Alex, apparently, and has a whole bunch of text messages waiting for her. She’d told her sister yesterday to wait, that as soon as she knew what was going on she’d give her the all clear to come down. But Alex sounded upset. Kara probably should have known that she wasn’t going to do exactly what she’d asked.

 _I’m coming down tomorrow with Sam and Ruby_ the most recent text message reads. _First thing in the morning. Let mom know._

Kara groans and rolls over. She can deal with it tomorrow.

**Author's Note:**

> come yell at me on tumblr @seabiscuits-us


End file.
